2. 外语
  3. Over the past few years, flying in coach has become an increasingly miserable experience. Legroom is practically nonexistent. Pa

Over the past few years, flying in coach has become an increasingly miserable experience. Legroom is practically nonexistent. Pa

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问题     Over the past few years, flying in coach has become an increasingly miserable experience. Legroom is practically nonexistent. Passengers are more tightly packed together. Hot meals have been eliminated. Ditto pillows and blankets. And the next time that guy in front of you leans his seat back directly into your face, few of your fellow passengers are likely to blame you if you feel a brief, murderous urge to strike back.
    【R1】________
    Doug Fesler, an executive at a medical research group in Washington, wasn’t expecting much in the way of amenities on his American Airlines flight to Honolulu in September. In fact, knowing the airline no longer served free meals, he had packed his own lunch for the second leg of his flight from Dallas to Honolulu. But he said he was shocked at the lack of basic services and the overall condition of the cabin.
    【R2】________
    His return flight was just as disappointing. This time the audio for the movie worked—but only in Spanish—and his seat refused to stay in the upright position. "I was just appalled, " Mr. Fesler said. "You pay $500 or $600 for a seat, and you expect it to be functional. " He said he has considered refusing to fly airlines with such poor service, but added that, " if you did that with every airline that made you mad, you’d never get anywhere in this country. "
    【R3】________
    The fact is that airlines, flying so close to full capacity today, have realized that they really don’t have to cater to economy passengers—most of whom are booking on price alone, and who increasingly have no real airline loyalty—because the cost of doing so would never be worth it in pure bottom-line terms.
    【R4】________
    While Mr. Baldanza may regret the manner in which his e-mail statement was delivered, his position hasn’t changed. "The point that I was making in that e-mail, maybe not as politically correctly as I should have, is let’s not over-obsess or spend a lot of money dealing with customers with completely unrealistic expectations, " he said, pointing out that the delay was due to weather and that the passenger was offered a $200 voucher toward future flights even though he had paid only $73 for two round-trip tickets. "When the fare’s this cheap, we’re going to get another customer, he said.
    【R5】________
    It’s all simple economics. In January, United removed half-ounce pretzel snack mixes from the economy section of flights that are less than two hours long—about 29 percent of its flights—to save what it says is about $650,000 a year. Meanwhile, America has estimated that it would save $30 million a year by eliminating free meal service in coach. Overall, the amount of money the nine largest passenger carriers in the United States spend on food per passenger has been slashed to about $3. 40 from $5. 92 in 1992, according to the Department of Transportation.
    A. Mr. Fesler is hardly alone in his antipathy toward the airlines, as anyone who has spent time reading the angry customer postings on Web sites like flyertalk. com, airlinerage. com and flightsfromhell. com knows.
    B. All this has created a generation of fliers who now view getting on a plane as roughly akin to entering the ninth circle of hell.
    C. Thus airlines are increasingly cutting back services in coach or charging passengers for things that used to be free, like meals or drinks or, in the case of Delta, US Airways, Northwest and Continental, starting to use narrow-body planes more frequently on trans-Atlantic flights, making those long-haul flights more cost-effective, albeit at the expense of passenger comfort.
    D. Passengers flying business class on United from Washington Dulles to Frankfurt, for example, are now offered 180-degree lie-flat" seats. The upgraded seats, which are part of a multimillion-dollar makeover of its international premium cabins, transform into 6-foot-4-inch beds and feature larger personal TV screens, iPod adapters and noise-canceling headphones.
    E. Does that sound harsh? Well, an unexpected—but not totally surprising—insight into how airline executives think these days came this summer when B. Ben Baldanza, chief executive of the aggressively bare-bones Spirit Airlines, hit "reply all" to an e-mail message from a passenger who wished to be compensated for a delayed flight that caused him to miss a concert he was planning to attend. Mr. Baldanza’s response, which seemed to be intended only for a Spirit Airlines employee but subsequently appeared on multiple travel blogs, said: "Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny. "
    F. On that flight, the audio for the movie was broken. The light that indicated when the bathroom was occupied was squirrely, causing confusion and, in some cases, embarrassingly long waits for passengers in need of the lavatory. And though food was available for purchase, it ran out before the flight attendants could serve the entire cabin, leaving some fellow passengers looking longingly at the snack he had packed.
【R5】
选项
答案C
解析 这里需要对前文进行一个总结。上一段说由于航班须赔偿延迟给乘客带来的损失，航空公司通过取消一些基本服务来平衡这些类似的费用。他们通过牺牲乘客的舒适度来获得最大的效益，与最后一段“It’s alI simple economics. ”相呼应，故选C。
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