Banking is about money; and no other familiar commodity(商品)arouses such excesses of passion and dislike. Nor is there any other

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问题     Banking is about money; and no other familiar commodity(商品)arouses such excesses of passion and dislike. Nor is there any other about which more nonsense is talked. The type of thing that comes to mind is not what is normally called economics, which is inexact rather than nonsensical, and only in the same way as all sciences are at the point where they try to predict people’s behavior and its consequences. Indeed most social sciences and, for example, medicine could probably be described in the same way.
    However, it is common to bear assertions of the kind "if you were left alone on a desert island, a few seed potatoes would be more useful to you than a million pounds" as though this proved something important about money except the undeniable fact that it would not be of much use to anyone in a situation where very few of us are at all likely to find ourselves. Money in fact is a token or symbolic object, exchangeable on demand by its holders for goods and services. Its use for these purposes is universal except within a small number of primitive agricultural communities.
    Money and price mechanism(机制), i. e. , the changes in prices expressed in money terms of different goods and services, are the means by which all modern societies regulate demand and supply for these things. Especially important are the relative changes in prices of different goods and services compared with each other. To take random examples: the price of house-building has over the past five years risen a good deal faster than that of domestic appliances like refrigerators, but slower than that of motor insurance or French Impressionist paintings. This fact has complex implications for students of the industry, trade unionism, town planning, insurance companies, fine-art auctions, and politics. Unpacking these implications is what economics is about, but their implications for bankers are quite different.
    In general, in modern industrialized societies, prices of services or goods produced in a context requiring high service content(e. g. a meal in a restaurant)are likely to rise more rapidly than prices of goods capable of mass-production(批量生产)on a large scale. It is also a characteristic of highly developed economics that the number of workers employed in service industries tends to rise and that of workers employed in manufacturing to fall. The discomfort this truth causes has been an important source of tension in Western political life for many years and is likely to remain so for many more.
The writer suggests that economics is concerned with______.

选项 A、explaining to bankers the price changes
B、understanding the effect of relative price changes
C、trying to understand why some prices rise fast
D、the same financial considerations as banking

答案B

解析 推断题.根据第三段的第二句Especially important are the relative changes in prices of different goodsand services compared with each other.(特别重要的是不同商品和服务价格的变化相互比较。)同时作者就不同商品和服务的价格变化给出具体的例子,在这一段的最后一句作者总结道:Unpackingthese implications is what economics is about(这些潜在的影响正是经济学要阐述的问题),这道题要综合整段文字的中心思想才能得出答案。A是说给银行家揭示价格变化;C是说试图了解为什么价格升得很快;D是说和金融业一样的财政考虑,都与题意不符。答案是B。
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