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  3. [img]2016m3s/ct_eyyjsaz2013c_eyyjsaread_0027_20163[/img] I want to talk abou

[img]2016m3s/ct_eyyjsaz2013c_eyyjsaread_0027_20163[/img] I want to talk abou

游客2024-08-05  25
问题
    I want to talk about the economy, not the one we hear about endlessly in the news each day and in politicians’ speeches, but the one we live in day by day. It’s where most of us live on a daily basis, earning our living, paying our taxes, and purchasing the necessities of life.
    The term "economic expansion" suggests something desirable and benevolent, but expansion simply means spending more money.
    More spending doesn’t mean that life is getting better. More spending merely feeds our whole economic system, which is based on production and consumption. Unless money keeps circulating, the economy collapses. If we don’t keep consuming, then manufacturers and retailers go out of business.
    As a leading economist put it, consumer societies are "in need of need". We don’t need the things the economy produces as much as the economy needs our sense of need for things. Need is the miracle that keeps the engines of expansion turning relentlessly. In economics, there is no concept of enough. It is a hunger that cannot be satisfied.
    There is so much craziness in the world. There is an American company that manufactures a range of food with a high fat content. This causes obesity and high blood pressure. By coincidence, the same company also makes products that help people who are trying to diet. Not only that, it even produces pills for those with high blood pressure.
    Nearly all of my mail consists of bills, banks trying to lend me money, catalogues trying to make me spend it, and charity appeals for the losers in this ecstasy of consumption—the homeless, the refugees, the exploited, the starving. Why is it possible to buy strawberries from Ecuador and green beans from Kenya when these countries can hardly feed their own people? It is because there are cash crops, and the countries need the money to service their debts. Notice that servicing a debt does not mean paying it off. It means just paying the interest. Western banks make vast profits from third world debt.
    We buy clothes that are manufactured in sweat shops by virtual slaves in poor parts of the world. We create mountains of waste. We demand cheap food, mindless of the fact that it is totally devoid of taste and is produced using chemicals that poison the land. We insist on our right to drive our own car wherever we want to go.
    The evil of the consumption culture is the way it makes us oblivious to the impact of our own behavior. Our main problem is not that we don’t know what to do about it. It is mustering the desire to do it. [br] According to the passage, _____ serve as the foundation of the whole economic system.
选项
答案 production and consumption
解析 (第三段第二句后半句提到“整个经济体系是依据生产和消费的。”)
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