2. 职称英语
  3. It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slippin

It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slippin

游客2025-04-02  8
问题     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 demand 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. [br] The author’ s attitude towards the issue seems to be______.
选项 A、biased
B、indifferent
C、puzzling
D、objective
答案 D
解析 从文章第1段的内容可知，外面的世界很危险；出门时，你可能会摔断腿；点炉时，你可能会烧毁整幢房屋；幸运的是，一场成功的民事诉讼或许就可以补偿你所受的灾难；大约从20世纪80年代早期开始，这种观念就一直这么延续着；当时，陪审团开始认为，更多的公司应该对其客户的灾祸负责；从文章第2段的内容可知，觉得处境危险后，公司方面便做出反应，在产品上写上越来越长的警告标签，希望以此来预警各种可能的事故；从第3段的内容可知，虽然警示标签通常是合理的和必需的，而且许多警示标签是州或联邦法律所要求的，但是，如果消费者受了伤，这些警示标签能否使制造商和销售商免于责任还不得而知；当受伤的消费者将制造商和销售商告上法庭时，大约一半的公司会输掉官司；从文章最后一段的内容可知，现在，这种趋势似乎正在扭转；个人伤害索赔案件如以往一样不断发生，但一些法庭开始支持被告，尤其在那些警示标签可能改变不了什么的案件中法庭会这样做；接着举例进一步作了说明；最后指出：美国法律协会发布了新的民事侵权行为法指导方针；如果法律界的这个不太过分的要求能够实现的话，那么产品上所附的信息实际上就可能是用来保护消费者的利益的，而不是用来规避法律责任的。据此可知，作者只是客观地分析、说明伤害索赔这个问题，并没有发表自己的观点，他的态度应该是客观的。D项与文章的意思相符，因此D项为正确答案。
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