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  3. Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

admin2013-07-11  31
问题                 Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession?
    People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the October 1929 stock market crash and lasted until the United States entered World War II. It is a vivid story of year upon year of despair. This Depression narrative, however, is not merely a story about the past: it has started to inform our current expectations .
    According to the Reuters—University of Michigan Survey of Consumers earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of consumers expected that the present downturn would last for five more years. President Obama, in his first press conference, evoked the Depression in warning of a "negative spiral" that "becomes difficult for us to get out of" and suggested the possibility of a " lost decade" as in Japan in the1990s. He said Congress needed to pass an economic stimulus package.
    The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation. But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation—because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our "animal spirits" reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popular response to vivid accounts of past depressions is partly psychological, but it has a rational base. We have to look at past episodes because economic theory, lacking the physical constants of the hard sciences, has never offered a complete account of the mechanics of depressions.
    To understand the story’s significance in driving our thinking, it is important to recognize that the Great Depression itself was partly driven by the retelling of earlier depression stories. In the 1930s, there was incessant talk about the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s: each of those downturns lasted for the better part of a decade.
    In his influential 1909 book, "Forty Years of American Finance," Alexander Dana Noyes argued that the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s might have lasted much longer, except for accidents of history—a " European famine and a bumper crop at home " which stimulated the domestic economy through its agricultural sector. Early in the Depression, Forrest Davis worried in "What Price Wall Street?" that weakness after the panic of 1907 might have led to a prolonged depression if not for the accident of the World War. In 1932, a review of this book in The Times mourned that Mr. Davis had given us "no especial assurance that any of the traditional accidents can save us once more. The last war showed how terrible the next war will he."
    Should President Obama have reinforced the Great Depression story? Perhaps he had to take that risk to promote the economic stimulus plan, and not just hope for some accident to save us. The story was already embedded in our consciousness, and will be with us until we see a real, solid boost from the stimulus package and its likely successors.
Which of the following statements is true according to the first two paragraphs?
选项 A、The Great Depression caused the 1929 stock market crash.
B、The Great Depression was worsened by people’s despair.
C、The present recession is influenced by the Great depression.
D、The present recession has created a lost decade.
答案C
解析 本题考查因果细节。文章第一段先介绍一个现象：历史上的大萧条成为当前人们热议的话题。然后提出这种热议的现象对当前所产生的影响：它已经开始影响到人们对于当前形势的期望(It has started to inform our current expectations)。第二段具体阐述大萧条怎样影响了从民众到总统的预期：近三分之二的消费者预计经济衰退还将持续五年；奥巴马则提到要警惕反向螺旋、警惕形成日本20世纪90年代那样的“失落的十年”，并建议制定经济刺激方案以避免这场灾难(to prevent the calamity)。从关于大萧条的热议使得人们对当前经济形势的预计相当悲观看出，当前的经济衰退已然受到了大萧条的影响，[C]选项正确。文章第一句提到大萧条发生在1929年10月股市崩溃之后，而[A]的说法明显颠倒了时间的先后顺序，错误。[B]选项从文章前两段无从推知，错误。由奥巴马在记者会上暗示形成类似日本“失落十年”的可能性可知，这种现象在美国尚未出现，[D]选项错误。
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