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  3. It’s Groundhog Day at the US Postal Service: time once again for the familiar laments about how the agency’s financial losses ar

It’s Groundhog Day at the US Postal Service: time once again for the familiar laments about how the agency’s financial losses ar

admin2014-06-25  56
问题     It’s Groundhog Day at the US Postal Service: time once again for the familiar laments about how the agency’s financial losses are surging, how demand for its services is plummeting, and how officials have no choice but to close local facilities, raise the price of stamps, and reduce delivery standards.
    Last week the Postal Service announced plans to cut $ 3 billion in costs by slowing down first-class mail service and eliminating about half of the country’s 461 mail-processing centers. That would mean an end to next-day delivery of first-class mail. Although that might not seem like much of a threat for something already thought of as "snail mail," the Postal Service has insisted for decades that 95 percent or more of local first-class mail is successfully delivered overnight. When the new standards take effect next spring, two-day delivery will become the new overnight, even for mail that’s just traveling down the street.
    If all this sounds familiar, you aren’t hallucinating. "In 1990, the Postal Service launched a nationwide plan to intentionally slow down mail delivery," policy analyst James Bovard wrote in his 1994 book, Lost Rights. First-class letters were already taking 20 percent longer to reach their destination than they had in 1969, but Postmaster General Anthony Frank assured Congress that the reduction in delivery standards would "improve our ability to deliver local mail on time. " In the weird logic and language of the American postal system, the key to success was to give the public less for its money.
    The Internet Age may be causing great damage to the post office and its mail-delivery business, but what industry in America isn’t going through the same painful experience? And not many institutions enjoy the benefits that federal law confers on the Postal Service: It pays no income or property taxes, it’s exempt from vehicle licensing requirements and parking fines, and it has the power of eminent domain. Most significant of all, it has a legal monopoly on the delivery of mail: The federal Private Express statutes make it a crime for any private carrier to deliver letters. The only exception is for "extremely urgent" letters, and even those may be delivered by a private company only if it’s willing to charge a much higher rate than the Postal Service would have charged.
    Yet with all its privileges, the Postal Service is struggling, while UPS and FedEx flourish. Why? Because they have something invaluable that the post office lacks: Competitors. "We have a business model that is failing," Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said last week. It’s true. But it was true long before e-mail came along. What is killing the post office is the lack of genuine, head-to-head competition that forces vendors to compete for customers by pushing quality up and holding prices down. Only in a government-sheltered monopoly like the Postal Service would labor costs remain as bloated as they have, year in and year out.
The 1990 nationwide plan brought the public
选项 A、a cheaper mail service
B、a faster mail delivery
C、a degraded mail service
D、an improved local delivery
答案C
解析 第三段首先指出1990年邮局制定了人为减慢邮件投递速度的计划。随后指出时任邮政总局局长对此举作出的解释：降低普通邮件投递标准会提高按时投递本地信函的能力。末句作者总结指出，这种解释相当荒谬。美国邮政系统实际上是通过这种方式实现拿公众的钱办更少的事。由此可见，1990年降低邮件投递标准的计划带来的是缩水的邮件投递服务，[C]选项正确。
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