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  3. A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

admin2014-04-20  1
问题     A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to many people from Africa. A desire for freshwater fish in New Delhi is best satisfied by haggling for the freshest rohu with fishmongers in Chittaranjan Park, the heart of the city’s fish-loving Bengali community. Markets that serve migrants are not just great for gourmands. They are also testament to the fact that people often retain very strong preferences for the kinds of food they grew up eating.
    Past research has shown that people are often willing to pay much more for a favored brand than for seemingly identical alternatives. And the new study finds a clever way to test this idea. The researchers had data on the purchases of 238 kinds of packaged goods by 38,000 American families between 2006 and 2008. Among the people studied 16% were migrants; they had grown up in one state and moved to another. They had the same options, in terms of what was on offer and at what price, as everyone else in their adopted home. But although they consumed more local favorites than someone in their native state would have, they bought fewer local hits(and more of the favorites from back home)than a longtime resident. And this gap between the purchases of migrants and that of the locally born was stubborn: although it faded the longer a person lived in their new state, it still took 20 years to halve in magnitude. Even 50 years on, it was still large enough to show up in the data.
    If this is generally true, it has important implications. For one thing, the benefits of being the first brand into a market could last longer than might be assumed. But David Atkin of Yale University suggests in another new paper that the effects of habit formation in consumption may also lead economists to rethink the way they calculate the gains from trade. This is because opening up to trade is in some ways akin to migrating. It changes the composition and prices of the goods that are available to a person. In particular, it can raise the relative prices of the goods that a region or country has a comparative advantage in, such as crops that the country’s climate or soil favor. These are the things that would have been relatively cheap and common in a closed economy and therefore the things that people might have acquired a taste for. To the extent that such preferences persist, people will benefit less from the increased variety of goods and altered relative prices that trade brings about than they would do if habits were not a significant determinant of consumption.  
What can be inferred from the last paragraph?
选项 A、The earlier you start a new business, the more you’ll get.
B、Prices in a closed economy may be lower than those in trade.
C、Opening up to trade may do harm to the local businesses.
D、It is hard for people to change their consumption habits.
答案D
解析 推断题。最后一段集中讨论了“顽固的”消费习惯带来的经济学启示。其中第二句提到“一旦成为市场第一品牌，其受益时间可能比预期的还要长”，也就是说，人们一旦认准某个品牌，就会长时间不改变。可见，消费习惯的改变是很难的。故[D]项的表述正确。[A]项误解了本段第二句话的意思，尽管第一个确立的品牌存在优势，但并不是对任何一桩生意都是越早开业越好，因此[A]项可以排除。[B]项的表述概念模糊，原文的意思是，由于受到习惯性选择的影响，当地产品具有先人为主的优势，而当外来商品进入时，当地产品所享有的这种优势可以让它的定价比封闭经济时更高。但不能由此推断说封闭经济地区的物价都比开放贸易的高。[C]项在原文中并没有依据，考生应注意不要受固有概念的影响，故排除[C]项。
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