2. 外语
  3. Imagine a world without brands.【R1】______No raucous advertising, no ugly billboards, and no McDonald’s. Yet, given a chance and

Imagine a world without brands.【R1】______No raucous advertising, no ugly billboards, and no McDonald’s. Yet, given a chance and

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问题     Imagine a world without brands.【R1】______No raucous advertising, no ugly billboards, and no McDonald’s. Yet, given a chance and a bit of money, people flee this Eden. They seek out Budweiser instead of their local tipple, ditch nameless shirts for Gap, prefer Marlboros to homegrown smokes. What should one conclude? That people are pawns in the hands of giant companies with huge advertising budgets and global reach? 【R2】______
    The pawn theory is argued, forcefully if not always coherently, by Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo", a book that has become a bible of the anti-globalization movement. Her thesis is that brands have come to represent "a fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests."【R3】______produced cheaply in third-world sweatshops, branded goods displace local alternatives and force a grey cultural homogeneity on the world.
   【R4】______Outside the United States, they are now symbols of America’s corporate power, since most of the world’s best-known brands are American. Around them accrete all the worries about environmental damage, human-rights abuses and sweated labor that anti-globalists like to put on their placards. No wonder brands seem bad.
   【R5】______They began as a form not of exploitation, but of consumer protection. In pre-industrial days, people knew exactly what went into their meat pies and which butchers were trustworthy; once they moved to cities, they no longer did. A brand provided a guarantee of reliability and quality. Its owner had a powerful incentive to ensure that each pie was as good as the previous one, because that would persuade people to come back for more.
    Just as distance created a need for brands in the 19th century, so in the age of globalization and the Internet it reinforces their value. A book-buyer might not entrust a company based in Seattle with his credit-card number had experience not taught him to trust the Amazon brand; an American might not accept a bottle of French water were it not for the name of Evian. 【R6】______
    Indeed, the dependence of successful brands on trust and consistent quality suggests that consumers need more of them. In poor countries, the arrival of foreign brands points to an increase in competition from which consumers gain. Anybody in Britain old enough to remember the hideous Wimpy, a travesty of a hamburger, must recall the arrival of McDonald’s with gratitude. Public services live in a No Logo world: attempts at government branding arouse derision. That is because brands have value only where consumers have choice, which rarely exists in public services. 【R7】______
    Brands are the tools with which companies seek to build and retain customer loyalty. Because that often requires expensive advertising and good marketing, a strong brand can raise both prices and barriers to entry. But not to insuperable levels: brands fade as tastes change(Nescafe has fallen, while Starbucks has risen); the vagaries of fashion can rebuild a brand that once seemed moribund(think of cars like the Mini or Beetle); and quality of service still counts(hence the rise of Amazon). 【R8】______
    A. Brands have thus become stalking horses for international capitalism.
    B. Or that brands bring something that people think is better than what they had before?
    C. Yet this is a wholly misleading account of the nature of brands.
    D. It existed once, and still exists, more or less, in the world’s poorest places.
    E. The absence of brands in the public sector reflects a world like that of the old Soviet Union, in which consumer choice has little role.
    F. Because consumer trust is the basis of all brand values, companies that own the brands have an immense incentive to work to retain that trust.
    G. The ubiquity and power of brand advertising curtails choice, she claims;
    H. Many brands have been around for more than a century, but the past two decades have seen many more displaced by new global names, such as Microsoft and Nokia.
【R5】
选项
答案C
解析 第4段中作者纠正了对品牌性质的错误理解。它不是一种侵略的方式，而是保护消费者的方式。选项C是本段的主题句，符合题意。
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