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  3. "The world as we know is going down!" shouted a hysterical New York City broker over a Starbucks latte in Der Speigel’s harrowin

"The world as we know is going down!" shouted a hysterical New York City broker over a Starbucks latte in Der Speigel’s harrowin

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问题     "The world as we know is going down!" shouted a hysterical New York City broker over a Starbucks latte in Der Speigel’s harrowing account of the September 2008. This was the nadir the financial panic that gripped the world. The Dow was collapsing by the hundreds each day, and banks with asset sheets worth more than the GDP of developed countries were teetering on bankruptcy.
    But 400 years ago, banking wasn’t so big. In fact, bankers were practically outcasts.
    Since Christians could not legally charge interest to other Christians, money lending fell mostly to Jews, like William Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Confined to ghettos, they conducted their business on benches, or banques(the root of the word bank). If you can imagine it today, the price of banking in the early 1600s was ostracism.
    How did we go from ghettos to Goldman? The great innovation in modern banking occurred in Florence, Niall Ferguson writes in his book The Ascent of Money. Giovanni di Medici, father of the great Cosimi di Medici, saw that while charging interest was a sin, nothing prevented a trader from making money on taking a commission for converting currencies. If converted currencies were advanced for longer periods of time, the commission would grow as well. By diversifying his investments across traders, depositors and different currencies, Giovanni created a truly booming, stable and legally acceptable bank.
    "Now for the first time," Ferguson explained, "money lending had evolved into banking."
    In the next four centuries, banking continued its radical evolution. In the 1600s, Amsterdam opened the world’s first stock exchange. In the late 1700s, Dutch traders inspired King William I to create the world’s first mutual funds. In the 1900s modern finance exploded, with the first hedge fund(1949), the first mortgage security(1968), the first collateralized debt obligation(1987), and the first credit default swap(1994). Money is getting smarter.
    Debt, credit and equity are as old as Hammurabi’s Code. But with each round of history, they are extended with greater force and cunning to more people. European countries invented bonds to pay for wars. The Dutch invented stock to pay for ships. Credit cards invented points to pay for goods. From the national level, to the corporate level, to the individual level, finance finds new ways to get us spending more.
    The democratization of money meant the democratization of debt. In the past, only governments and large international companies had the chance to spend themselves into oblivion. Today, we’re all so lucky! Easier money, in the form of credit cards smartphone apps, encourages us to buy, buy, buy. Maybe that’s why household debt weighs more than half of GDP in eight countries. Maybe that’s why the average American worker entered the recession with debt equal to 122 percent of her yearly salary. Brilliant ways to extend credit and financing have invigorated the global economy. But somewhere between the home equity loans and the credit default swaps, we tricked ourselves. Smart money in the hands of greedy bankers and wide-eyed breadwinners looks like dumb money, indeed.
The purpose of the author in writing Paragraph 1 is______.
选项 A、to show that September 2008 was the nadir
B、to show the severity of the financial panic
C、to show that banking wasn’t so big 400 years ago
D、to show the feeling of a hysterical New York City broker
答案B
解析 属推断题。该类题一定不能看字面意思来决定答案。A项意思是“2008年9月是最消沉的时刻”，属于字面意思，不选。C项是第二段的内容，不选。D项在文章第一句有反映，但显然是细节，不选。B项综合概括了本段的含义，指出了本次金融恐慌的严重程度。
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考研英语一

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