单项选择题

Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U. S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.
To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand where American ignorance comes from. Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U. S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. Different from many European countries, we’re saddled with a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office. "Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote," says Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, "and that discourages you from learning more."
It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, "We have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English. "Other factors aggravate the situation. A big one, Hacker argues, is the decentralized U. S. education system, which is run mostly by individual states. "When you have more centrally managed curricula, you have more common knowledge and a stronger civic culture." Another hitch is our reliance on market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting, which, "devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas."
For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in India affects the autoworker in Detroit. The current conflict over government spending illustrates the new dangers of ignorance. Every economist knows how to deal with the debt. But poll after poll shows that voters have no clue what the budget actually looks like. As a result, we’re now arguing over short-term spending cuts while doing nothing to tackle the long-term fiscal challenges that threaten our ability to compete globally.
Given our history, it’s hard to imagine this changing any time soon. But that isn’t to say a change wouldn’t help. "The problem is ignorance, not stupidity, "Hacker says. "We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability. " Whether that’s a treatable distress or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now’s the time to start searching for a cure.
American ignorance on the issue about government spending has resulted in that ______.