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  3. Should the Treasury sell its economic forecasting computers for scrap? For the past two years no one outside the Conservative Pa

Should the Treasury sell its economic forecasting computers for scrap? For the past two years no one outside the Conservative Pa

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问题     Should the Treasury sell its economic forecasting computers for scrap? For the past two years no one outside the Conservative Party and White-hall has believed a Treasury forecast. Anyone with half an eye on the unemployment figures or with a mortgage knew that Chancellor Norman Lamont’s repeated claims about recovery being "just around the corner" were untrue.
    Yet only a fortnight ago Gary Becker, an American economist, won a Nobel prize for his work on using economics to explain aspects of human behavior, such as drug addiction and crime. So why do e-conomists using Britain’s longest running predictive model still have trouble forecasting whether people will spend more or less money in the shops in the next three months? The answer is that they are caught in a race they cannot win, where however fast they try to keep their predictive equations abreast (not behind) of changing patterns in production and spending, peoples’ behavior changes faster.
    Some people claim economics and econometrics should be expelled from the broad scientific church. But that would be foolish. Their present weakness is that they are only perfect when dealing with theory. Use them to make real-world forecasts and things go wrong-principally the answers. But that is typical of a young science. Until the 1930s, only economists were interested in accurately predicting the economic behavior of large numbers of people. The Depression made it a matter of wider interest and urgency. The emergence then of national income statistics helped economics and econometrics to develop. But the art in using both still lies in knowing, when you are crossing the line between prediction and guesswork.
    The government seems not to recognize this. Of late it has pushed and pulled the levers of money supply, tax and interest rates like children let loose on the bridge of a ship. And politicians such as Lamont also have a hand in Treasury forecasts.
    "That is the worst way to use a science" , says Becker. "If economics has any claim to be a science and to belong to the Nobel award structure—and I firmly believe that it does—then economists should avoid political propaganda and convey to the public some flavor of the scientific quality of economics. The government should stop interfering and let its specialists apply their programs, which embody years of experience, as tools to solve the problem of how to make the economy healthy".  
From the text we can learn that the Britain’s economic situation is ______.
选项 A、as satisfactory as never
B、far from encouraging
C、on the verge of collapse
D、on the eve of a leap
答案B
解析 推理题。第一段最后指出：任何稍微关注失业数字或抵押的人都知道，财政部长一再重申的“经济复苏即将来临”的说法并不真实。这说明：英国的经济状况很不乐观。B符合题意，为正确选项。D与此意相反；A和C都属于not given类型。
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