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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

admin2010-08-21  49
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 toy "does not enable user to fly".
    While warnings are often appropriate and necessary — the dangers of drug interactions, for instance — 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 Sportswear 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 stating that companies need not warn customers of various dangers or bombard (轰炸) them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buries in a sea of trivialities." says a law professor at Comell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. "The information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability."
According to the American Law Institute, the warnings on products should not be intended for legal protection but for ______ .
选项
答案the benefit of customers
解析 参见最后一段后半部分，the American Law Institute发布新指令，建议厂家不必写过多的警告，因为这样一来，真正重要警示信息反而被淹没忽略了。商品警示信息本来应用于保护顾客的利益而非逃避法律责任。
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