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  3. 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

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

admin2016-06-22  12
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.
What were things like in 1980s when accidents happened?
选项 A、Customers might be relieved of their disasters through lawsuits.
B、Injured customers could expect protection from the legal system.
C、Companies would avoid being sued by providing new warnings.
D、Juries tended to find fault witb the compensations companies promised.
答案B
解析 本题可参照文章的第1段。从中可知，出门时，你可能会因为门前的擦鞋垫滑倒而摔断腿；点炉子时，你可能会因此烧毁整幢房屋。幸运的是，如果垫子或炉子没有提醒你即将发生的危险，一场成功的民事诉讼或许就可以补偿你所受的伤害。大约从20世纪80年代初开始，这种观念就一直这么延续着——当时，陪审团开始认为，更多的公司应该对其客户遭受的不幸负责。据此可知，20世纪80年代，如果消费者因商品而受伤，法律会保护他们，法庭会裁定公司应该对消费者遭受的不幸负责。B项与文中的意思相符，因此B项为正确答案。
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