It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could

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问题     It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes.
    Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might—surprise—fall off. The label on a child’s Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly".
    While warnings are often appropriate and necessary—the dangers of drug interactions, for example—and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn’t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
    Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’s injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute—a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight—issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.
It can be inferred from the text that______.

选项 A、once customers’ misfortunes happen, they can get compensation from companies
B、once customers’ misfortunes happen, they can’t get compensation from companies
C、according to current law, the information on the products was provided for the benefits of customers
D、according to current law, the information on the products was provided as protection against legal liability

答案D

解析 从全文而知,第4段举了SChutt体育公司的例子说明,消费者受伤也不一定得到赔偿,因此A项不正确,而文章一开始说在20世纪80年代以前消费者受伤可以幸运地得到公司的赔偿,因此B项也不正确,A项和B项表述都很片面。根据文章最后一段可知,如果康奈尔大学教授起草的法律能够实施,则“产品上提供的信息实际上可能是用来保护消费者利益的,而不只是为了保护公司摆脱法律责任的”,由此可推知,在还没有实施那个法律的当前情况下,警示语是用来保护公司摆脱法律责任的,因此本题选D项。
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