2. 外语
  3. It’s a brand new world—a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re

It’s a brand new world—a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re

admin2010-12-04  42
问题       It’s a brand new world—a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re on supermarket shelves, of course, but also in business plans for network company startups and in the names of sports complexes. Brands are infiltrating (渗透) people’s everyday lives—by sticking their logos on clothes, in concert programs, on subway station walls, even in elementary school classrooms.
      We live in an age in which CBS newscasters wear Nike jackets on the air, in which Burger King and McDonald’s open kiosks (小亭) in elementary school lunchrooms. But as brands reach (and then overreach) into every aspect of our lives, the companies behind them invite more questions, deeper scrutiny—and an inevitable backlash by consumers.
      "Our intellectual lives and our public spaces are being taken over by marketing and that has real implications for citizenship," says author and activist Naomi Klien. "It’s important for any healthy culture to have public space—a place where people are treated as citizens instead of as consumers. We’ve completely lost that space."
      Since the mid-1980s, as more and more companies have shifted from being about products to being about ideas, Starbucks isn’t selling coffee; it’s selling community! Those companies have poured more and more resources into marketing campaigns.
To pay for those campaigns, those same companies figured out ways to cut costs elsewhere, for example, by using contract labor at home and low-wage labor in developing countries. Contract laborers are hired on a temporary, per-assignment basis, and employers have no obligation to provide any benefit (such as health insurance) or long-term job security. This saves companies money but obviously puts workers in vulnerable situations. In the United States, contract labor has given rise to so-called McJobs, which employers and workers alike pretend are temporary—even though these jobs are usually held by adults who are trying to support families.
      The massive expansion of marketing campaigns in the 1980s coincided with the reduction of government spending for schools and for museums. This made those institutions much too willing, even eager, to partner with private companies. But companies took advantage of the needs of those institutions, reaching too far, and overwhelming the civic space with their marketing agendas.  
How can the companies cut their cost according to the passage?
选项 A、They dismiss some employees to save money.
B、They use temporary labors and cheap labors.
C、They don’t pay for the employees’ health insurance.
D、They invest money on marketing campaigns.
答案B
解析 综合理解题。第五段首句指出，为了给这些活动筹集资金，那些公司想出很多方法来减少其他方面的开支；接着进行举例：使用contract labor(合同劳动力)和low-wage labor(低薪劳动力)；第二句又具体介绍了contract labor实际上是一种临时聘用的劳动力，即temporary labors，而low-wage labor也就是cheap labors。综合起来，B)“他们使用临时劳动力和廉价劳动力”是原文的同义转述，为正确答案。
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