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  3. America’s more capitalist sports fans commonly acknowledge that their country

America’s more capitalist sports fans commonly acknowledge that their country

游客2025-01-29  22
问题    America’s more capitalist sports fans commonly acknowledge that their country’s most popular sports, like the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, have several rules that would please a Scandinavian social democrat. Salary caps and luxury taxes limit how much each team can spend on players, punish those that over-spend, and close the gap between rich and poor teams. In both sports, the top draft picks typically go to the worst-performing squads from the previous year. Revenue sharing redistributes wealth among the rich and poor teams. Overall, success is punished by design, misfortune is rewarded by design, and the power of wealth is circumscribed with spending caps.
   It’s a different story across the Atlantic, where many European soccer leagues have practices that would please an American conservative. There are few salary-cap rules, so a handful of rich teams tend to dominate annually. When a soccer team performs poorly, it is not rewarded with a high draft pick. Instead, the club is relegated to a less competitive league, a mighty blow to their revenue. Meanwhile the most successful teams from lower divisions are promoted to more competitive leagues where they can earn even more money.
   For years, economists have wondered why America doesn’t share Europe’s socialist approach to government. But maybe it’s worth flipping the question: Why don’t European sports share U.S.-style socialism? Why do European soccer leagues punish the downtrodden, while American sports are so soft on losers?
   In their famous 2001 paper, "Why Doesn’t The U.S. Have A European-Style Welfare State?" the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote pointed out that public policies are an echo of national history. For example, in the U.S., the legacy of the 19th century’s "open frontier" made Americans skeptical of government intrusion, while the absence of an influential socialist party after World War II made it difficult for leftist policies to take root.
   By analogy, perhaps, one could look to history to see the origin of Europe’s surprisingly free-market approach to sports. The rules of today’s English Premier League can be traced to the late 19th century, when English soccer was in a period of rapid growth, with hundreds of English and Welsh clubs forming in several decades. Owners, players, and fans all recognized that the helter-skelter scheduling made it harder for people to plan their lives around soccer. In 1888, 12 teams banded together to form England’s first Football League. This provided a modicum of structure to the beautiful game, such as set schedules and guaranteed home games. In its original rules, the worst teams in the league had to apply for "reelection" to remain. Otherwise, one of England’s hundreds of other soccer teams could take their place. As the League grew in size and number of divisions, reelection evolved into a system of promotion and relegation — a model that has taken hold in soccer leagues in Europe and around the world. [br] Which of the following words is closest in meaning to the underlined word "relegated" in Paragraph 2?
选项 A、chosen
B、downgraded
C、reduced
D、introduced
答案 B
解析 第2段第三、四句表示如果一支球队踢得差，不会有优先的选秀权，而是会被降级到次级联赛，这对他们的收入来说是一个重大打击。A项表示“选择”，C项be reduced to表示“沦落为”，D项表示“介绍”，都与句意不符。relegated表示“降级”，downgraded与其意思相同，B项正确。
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