In some ways, the United States has made spectacular progress. Fires no longer destroy 18,000 buildings as they did in the Great

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问题     In some ways, the United States has made spectacular progress. Fires no longer destroy 18,000 buildings as they did in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or kill half a town of 2,400 people, as they did the same night in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Other than the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire in Kentucky in 1977, it has been four decades since more than 100 Americans died in a fire.
    But even with such successes, the United States still has one of the worst fire death rates in the world. Safety experts say the problem is neither money nor technology, but the indifference of a country that just will not take fires seriously enough.
    American fire departments are some of the world’s fastest and best-equipped. They have to be. The United States has twice Japan’s population, and 40 times as many as fires. It spends far less on preventing fires than on fighting them. And American fire-safety lessons are aimed almost entirely at children, who die in disproportionately large numbers in fires but who, contrary to popular myth, start very few of then.
    Experts say the fatal error is an attitude that fires are not really anyone’s fault. That is not so in other countries, where both public education and the law treat fires as either a personal failing or a crime. Japan has many wood houses; of the estimated 48 fires in world history that burned more than 10,000 buildings, Japan has had 27. Penalties for causing a severe fire by negligence can be as high as life imprisonment.
    In the United States, most education dollars are spent in elementary schools. But the lessons are aimed at too limited an audience; just 9 percent of all fire deaths are caused by children playing with matches.
    The United States continues to rely more on technology than laws or social pressure. There are some smoke detectors in 85 percent of all homes. Some local building codes now require home sprinklers. New heaters and irons shut themselves off if they are tipped.
In what aspects should the United States learn from Japan?

选项 A、Architecture and building material.
B、Education and technology.
C、Laws and attitude.
D、All of the above.

答案C

解析 文章第四段中提到:专家说致命的错误是这样一种态度,即火灾其实不是任何人的过失。然而在其他国家却不是这样。在那些国家,公共教育和法律把火灾看成是个人的过失,或者是犯罪行为,所以人们对火灾的注意和重视程度要比美国做得好。列举日本这个例子是对专家所提出观点的一个论证。可见,对火灾的态度以及公共教育和法律是美国应该向日本学习的内容。C项符合文章的意思。在文章第四段作者提到了日本的建筑艺术和建筑材料更容易产生火灾。所以A项不对。文章第二段中指出了美国火灾的高死亡率与其自身的资金和技术是没有关系的,所以美国不必去学别国应对火灾的技术。因此B项也不对。所以本题的正确答案为C。
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