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  3. Passage Three (1) Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty

Passage Three (1) Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty

游客2024-11-03  4
问题     Passage Three
    (1) Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty of fish in the sea, yet many are unhygienic, self-absorbed, disconcertingly attached to ex-fish, or fans of Donald Trump. Digital dating sites, including a growing
    array of matchmaking apps, are meant to help. Their design owes more to hard-nosed economics than it does to the mysteries of the heart.
    (2)   In a sense, searching for a mate is not so different from hunting for a job. Jobs, like prospective partners, have their strengths and weaknesses, which makes finding the right one a matter of complicated tradeoffs. Such exchanges are different from other transactions, in that both parties must be enthusiastic about the match for it to happen. A supermarket, in contrast, does not particularly care whose wallet it is draining, nor does the power company agonise about whether a customer is worthy of its watts.
    (3)  Alvin Roth, who won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on market design, made a career of studying such "matching markets" , where supply and demand are not balanced by price. Instead, people transact based on information. An apple-seller can nudge down his prices until the whole cart is sold. Yet if Apple were looking to hire two workers, it would not set a salary so puny that only two people applied. The quality of new hires often matters at least as much as their salaries.
    (4)  Mr. Roth, who won the prize jointly with Lloyd Shapley in 2012, found that the structure of matching markets made a significant difference in determining who wound up with whom. Systems designed to elicit people’s true preferences generated better matches between hospitals and doctors, for example. But the entire medical profession has an interest in improving matches, and so can set up a national clearing house (信息搜集 所) to do just that. The lovelorn (失恋的) must instead rely on an array of digital matchmakers.
    (5)   Good matches depend on good information. Even without digital help, people usually have some inkling of how much they have in common. Cosmopolitan strivers move to New York, say, rather than sleepier cities, in part because they will meet other ambitious types with similar interests. Within New York, the places people choose to spend their time—whether Yankee Stadium or a yoga studio—determine which sorts of people they come into contact with. Because it is expensive to live in New York, and to spend time sweating in a yoga studio or swearing in the stands, people in such settings can be reasonably confident those around them are in some sense like-minded.
    (6)  But one critical bit of information is missing: whether there is mutual interest. The act of asking someone out is fraught. In the non-digital world, approaching a potential partner brings the risk of awkwardness or humiliation. Digital dating reduces this cost dramatically. Apps like Tinder and Happn, for example, reveal that a user likes another only when the feeling is mutual.
    (7)  The best matching markets are those that are "thick" , with lots of participants. The more people there are seeking digital dates, the greater the chance of finding a good match. Odds improve that another person in the crowd also enjoys Wagner, Thai food, or discussions about the economics of matching markets.
    (8)  The wealth of information many dating sites request may help to home in on the perfect match, but if the effort involved is enough to deter potential mates from joining in the first place, then it does more harm than good. When Tinder first launched, largely to facilitate casual sex, users assessed one another based only on looks, age and gender. Simplicity worked wonders; there are 26m matches made between Tinder users each day.
    (9)   The advantages of thick markets are lost, however, if they become too "congested", with users overwhelmed by the number of participants and unable to locate a good match among them. One response is to specialise. JSwipe, for instance, caters to Jewish singles while Bumble, an app where women must initiate contact, is meant to attract feminists.
    (10)   But the most popular apps seek to help their users filter possible mates using clever technology. Tinder, for example, only provides users with profiles of fellow Tinderites who are nearby, to make it that much easier to meet in person. It has also introduced a "super like" feature, which can be deployed only once a day, to allow smitten users to signal heightened interest in someone. In addition, last year it started allowing people to list their jobs and education, to help users to sort through the crowds. Users get the benefits both of a big pool of  potential partners and various tools to winnow them. Sex and the city
    (11)  The emergence of matching apps, for those seeking love or theatre tickets or a lift, has certainly made once-onerous tasks more convenient. They may also contribute to more profound economic change. Dating apps could strengthen the trend toward " assortative mating (选型交配)" , whereby people choose to couple with those of similar income and skills. By one estimate, the trend accounts for about 18% of the rise in income inequality in America between 1960 and 2005. A recent study of online dating in South Korea found that it boosted sorting among couples by education.
    (12)   Better matching may also mean bigger cities. Metropolitan goliaths have long been melting-pots, within which those early on in their adult lives link up with jobs, friends and mates. Matching apps, romantic or not, make it easier to navigate the urban sprawl and sample all it has to offer. That, in turn, should make the biggest cities relatively more attractive to young people.
    (13)  Apps cannot yet make break-ups less painful. And love remains mysterious enough that even the most refined algorithms (算法) cannot predict mutual attraction with confidence. But they clearly help, judging by their legions of users. After all, it is better to have super-liked and lost than never to have super-liked at all. [br] Which of the following statements about Alvin Roth is TRUE?
选项 A、He studied the recruitment of Apple throughout his career.
B、He thought supply and demand were balanced by price in matching markets.
C、He won the Nobel prize in economics by himself.
D、He found the structure of matching markets was very important.
答案 D
解析 细节题。文章第四段第一句提到在2012年与罗伊德.沙普利共同获得诺贝尔经济学奖的罗斯先生发现，匹配市场的结构对决定谁与谁匹配产生了极大影响。由此可知罗斯先生发现匹配市场的结构非常重要，故[D]为答案，同时排除[C]“他靠自己一个人获得了诺贝尔经济学奖”。第三段第一句提到，埃尔文.罗斯在研究这种“匹配市场”方面颇有建树，该段最后两句虽然提到了苹果公司的招聘，但这是为了举例说明人们以信息为基础进行交易，而非埃尔文.罗斯整个职业生涯的研究对象，故排除[A]；第三段第一句还提到埃尔文.罗斯研究的匹配市场的供需并不是由价格来平衡的，由此可知[B]“他认为匹配市场的供需由价格来平衡”与原文不符，故排除。
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