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It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers' misfortunes.
Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might-surprise! --fall off. The label on a child's Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly."
While warnings are often appropriate and necessary--the dangers of drug interactions, for example--and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn't clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn't have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We're really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren't designed to prevent those kinds of injuries, "says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete's injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight-issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.
52. Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to__
[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products
[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products
[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability
[D] feel obliged to view customers' safety as their first concern
[答案] C
[解题思路] 本题对应于文章第二段的第一句话"Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident"（公司因此感到了威胁，便做出了反应，写出越来越长的警示标识语，力图预先标明种种可能发生的事故），可见商家极尽能事用商标来警告客户以免除自己的法律责任，因此C选项符合题意。A和B选项的satisfy customers和become honest都不是警告标签的主要原因，而D选项feel obliged to ...没有在原文中体现出来。
[题目译文]
文章中提到的生产者倾向于 。
[A] 通过在产品上标上很长的警示语来满足顾客
[B] 在描述产品缺点时变得更加诚实
[C] 充分利用警示牌以避免负法律责任
[D] 认为自己有责任把顾客的安全放在第一位
2000年Passage 2
Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, by babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby)surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone.
There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years -even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
58. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
[A] Sex Ration Changes in Human Evolution
[B] Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution
[C] The Evolutionary Future of Nature
[D] Human Evolution Going Nowhere
[答案] D
[解题思路]
纵观全文，主要讨论的是人类已经停止了进化的问题，由此可以对各个选项进行排除。A选项关于性别问题在第一段中有所提及但却不是文章的重点。B选项的话题正好与文章相反，也是错误选项。C选项的话题范围太大，文章针对的只是人类，而不是大自然的进化。而D则正好契合原文的主题。
[题目译文]
下面哪一项是本文的最佳标题？
[A] 人类进化中的性别比例变化
[B] 人类进化继续的办法
[C] 自然的进化前景
[D] 人类进化毫无发展
2000年Passage 3
When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for, however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, it is possible that in years to come they may be regarded as normal. With regard to Futurist poetry, however, the case is rather difficult, for whatever Futurist poetry may be even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right, it can hardly be classed as Literature.
This, in brief, is what the Futurist says; for a noise and violence and speed. Consequently, our feelings, thoughts and emotions have undergone a corresponding change. This speeding up of life, says the Futurist, requires a new form of expression. We must speed up our literature too, if we want to interpret modern stress. We must pour out a large stream of essential words, unhampered by stops, or qualifying adjectives, of finite verbs. Instead of describing sounds we must make up words that imitate them; we must use many sizes of type and different colored inks on the same page, and shorten or lengthen words at will.
Certainly their descriptions of battles are confused. But it is a little upsetting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge off which they both fall into the river and then to find that the line consists of the noise of their falling and the weights of the officers:' Pluff! Pluff! A hundred and eighty-five kilograms.'
This, though it fulfills the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry, can hardly be classed as Literature. All the same, no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition: that a great change in our emotional life calls for a change of expression. The whole question is really this: have we essentially changed?
59. This passage is mainly____.
[A] a survey of new approaches to art
[B] a review of Futurist poetry
[C] about merits of the Futurist movement
[D] about laws and requirements of literature
[答案] B
[解题思路]
这道题要求从宏观上判断文章的主旨，考生在阅读全文、尤其是重点考察各段首句（即主题句）之后得出结论不会困难，即本文讨论的是对未来派诗歌的评论，因此B为正确选项。A的错误在于本文不算是一个survey（调查）。C选项虽涉及未来派诗歌，却不是文章讨论的主要话题。D选项更是与原文风格不相符，可以迅速派出。
[题目译文]
这篇文章主要 。
[A] 评论新的艺术手法
[B] 评论未来派诗歌
[C] 讨论未来主义运动的优点
[D] 讨论文学的规律和要求
