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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 judge, 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 end 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. What were things like in 1980s when accidents happened

A.Customers might be relieved of their disasters through lawsuits.
B.Injured customers could expect protection from the legal system.
C.Companies would avoid being sued by providing new warnings.
D.Juries tended to find fault with the compensations companies promised.
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At the start of the 20th century, immigrant labor and innovation helped turn the U. S. into a powerful manufacturing nation. Today, foreign-born engineers jam the corridors of Silicon Valley,helping America’’s information-technology boom. And as the 21st century dawns, yet another wave of immigrants will once again help transform the economy.46)During the next decade, excepting a change in government policy, nearly a million immigrants are expected to arrive in the U. S. every year,most of whom,both legal and illegal,will continue to come from Latin America and Southeast Asia, but every foreign land will be represented.As domestic birthrates stagnate, only foreign-born worker will keep the labor pool growing. By 2006, in fact, immigrants will account for half of all new U. S. workers; over the next 30 years, their share will rise to 60%.47) Even at current levels of immigration, according to the Labor Dept. the number of people available to work will increase by a mere 0.8% per year between 1996 and 2006-half the rate of the previous decade. Without immigrants, according to a new study, the U. S. workforce would actually begin to shrink by 2015.48) It’’s not all about sheer numbers, of course:To lift productivity and spur growth, immigrants must provide creativity, entrepreneurial energy, or simple initiative that America couldn’’t find otherwise. If all you did was bring in people who are exactly the same as those we have here, there would be no economic benefit, says Rand Corp. economist James P. Smith, You’’d just have more people. Just as crucial, the array of education and skills immigrants bring could fit neatly with the supply of jobs over the next decade. According to Linda Levine at the Congressional Research Service,60% of the jobs created through 2005 will require some post-secondary education. But, she adds, low-skill jobs will still represent about half of total employment. 49) Yet immigrants also are 50% more likely than Americans to have a graduate degree, and an unbelievable 23% of U. S. residents holding PhDs in science and engineering are foreign-born, according to the National Science Foundation.Indeed, foreign-born workers have shown an extraordinary ability to assimilate and flourish. Certainly, some less skilled workers will remain at the bottom economic rung all their lives. 50) Yet others will catch up quickly, and within a decade of their arrival, the well-educated will go from making barely half that of native-born Americans in comparable work to nearly 90%, according to a recent study.That, of course, will raise immigrants’’ living standards. More important, it will help drive innovation and entrepreneurship,key engines of the 21st Century Economy.