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  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2025-04-07  23
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] Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to______.
选项 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
解析 从文章第2段的内容可知，由于感到(赔偿的)威胁，公司便想出对策——在产品上写上更长的警告标签，希望以此来预见各种可能的事故；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，如果消费者受伤，这些警示标签能否使制造商和销售商免担责任还不得而知；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。据此可知，制造商和销售商们试图利用警示标签来避免承担责任。C项与文章的意思相符，因此C项为正确答案。
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