2. 外语
  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

admin2017-07-31  51
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 demand 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.
The case of Schutt helmet demonstrated that______.
选项 A、some injury claims were no longer supported by law
B、helmets were not designed to prevent injuries
C、product labels would eventually be discarded
D、some sports games might lose popularity with athletes
答案A
解析 本题可参照文章的第4段。从中可知，这种趋势似乎正在扭转；个人伤害索赔案件如以往一样不断发生，但一些法庭开始支持被告，尤其在那些警示标签可能改变不了什么的案件中法庭会这样做；然后文章举例进一步说明，指出：Nimmons说，“我们对他的瘫痪深感遗憾，但我们设计这些防护头盔并不是为了防止那类伤害的”；陪审团一致认为，造成运动员受伤的原因是橄榄球运动本身的性质，不是防护头盔；与此同时，美国法律协会发布了新的民事侵权行为法指导方针；如果法律界的这个适度目标能够实现的话，那么产品上所附的信息实际上就可能是用来保护消费者的利益的，而不是用来规避法律责任的。据此可知，“Schutt体育用品公司”制作的防护头盔的例子证明——法庭不再支持那些警示标签可能改变不了什么的案件的受伤索赔。A项与文章的意思相符，因此A项为正确答案。
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