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  3. Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or

Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or

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问题     Governments typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or recycling their garbage: exhortation and fines. These efforts are often ineffective. As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults.
    In this spirit, the Swedish division of Volkswagen has sponsored an initiative they call The Fun Theory. Their first project is to get people to use a set of stairs rather than the escalator that ran alongside it. By transforming the stairs into a piano-style keyboard such that walking on the steps produced notes, they made using the stairs fun, and they found that stair use increased by 66 percent.
    The musical stairs idea is more amusing than practical, so The Fun Theory sponsored a contest to generate other ideas. The winning entry suggested offering both positive and negative reinforcement to encourage safe driving. Specifically, a camera would measure the speed of passing cars. Speeders would be issued fines but some of the fine revenues would be distributed via lottery to drivers who were observed obeying the speed limit. A short test of the idea offered promising results.
    This example illustrates an important behavioral point: many people love lotteries. In using lotteries to motivate it is important to get the details right. Participants are likely to find a lottery more enticing if they find out that they would have won. The Dutch government uses this principle very effectively. One of its state lotteries is based on postal codes. If your postal code is announced as the winner, you know that you would have won had you only bought a ticket. The idea is to play on people’s feelings of regret.
    Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. Of course you can simply pay people for doing the right thing, but if the payment is small, it could well backfire.(If the total non-speeding-prize money had been divided up evenly among all those who drove within speed limit, I estimate that the price paid would have been about 25 cents per driver. Would anyone bother for that?)
    An alternative to lotteries is a frequent-flyer-type reward program, where the points can be redeemed for something fun. A free goodie can be a better inducement than cash since it offers that rarest of commodities, a guilt-free pleasure. This sort of reward system has been successfully used in England to encourage recycling. In the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead outside of London, citizens could sign up for a rewards program in which they earned points depending on the weight of the material they recycled. The points were good for discounts at merchants in the area. Recycling increased by 35 percent. The moral here is simple. If governments want to encourage good citizenship, they should try making the desired behavior more fun.
The word exhortation in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、persuading
B、arresting
C、suing
D、rewarding
答案A
解析 第一段第一句话介绍了政府为了鼓励公民行为的通常做法，主要有两种手段，一种是exhortation，一种是罚款。而这两种举措往往都收效甚微，因此西方国家才独具匠心地开展了趣味公民活动，旨在通过褒奖的方式提升公民意识。可见exhortation和fine一样都是负面性、惩戒性的政府行为，因此，可将[D]选项排除。剩下的几个选项，[B]和[C]两个选项不符合常识，政府一般不会因为没有履行公民职责就逮捕和起诉某人，因此正确答案应该选[A]。exhortation的意思是“规劝”，和persuading类似。
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