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  3. Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in 18th-century

Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in 18th-century

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问题     Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and services that took place in 18th-century England. McKendrick has explored the Wedgwood firm’s remarkable success in marketing luxury pottery; Plumb has written about the proliferation of provincial theaters, musical festivals, and children’s toys and books. While the fact of this consumer revolution is hardly in doubt, three key questions remain: Who were the consumers? What were their motives? And what were the effects of the new demand for luxuries?
    An answer to the first of these has been difficult to obtain. Although it has been possible to infer from the goods and services actually produced what manufactures and servicing trades thought their customers wanted, only a study of relevant personal documents written by actual consumers will provide a precise picture of who wanted what. We still need to know how large this consumer market was and how far down the social scale the consumer demand for luxury goods penetrated. With regard to this last question, we might note in passing that Thompson, while rightly restoring laboring people to the stage of 18th-century English history, has probably exaggerated the opposition of these people to the inroads of capitalist consumerism in general; for example, laboring people in eighteenth-century England readily shifted from home-brewed beer to standardized beer produced by huge, heavily capitalized urban breweries.
    To answer the question of why consumers became so eager to buy, some historians have pointed to the ability of manufacturers to advertise in a relatively uncensored press. This, however, hardly seems a sufficient answer. McKendrick favors a Veblen model of conspicuous consumption stimulated by competition for status. The "middling sort" bought goods and services because they wanted to follow fashions set by the rich. Again, we may wonder whether this explanation is sufficient. Do not people enjoy buying things as a form of self-gratification? If so, consumerism could be seen as a product of the rise of new concepts of individualism and materialism(a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things), but not necessarily of the frenzy for conspicuous competition.
    Finally, what were the consequences of this consumer demand for luxuries? McKendrick claims that it goes a long way toward explaining the coming of the Industrial Revolution. But does it? What, for example, does the production of high-quality pottery and toys have to do with the development of iron manufacture or textile mills? It is perfectly possible to have the psychology and reality of a consumer society without a heavy industrial sector.
    That future exploration of these key questions is undoubtedly necessary should not, however, diminish the force of the conclusion of recent studies: the insatiable demand in eighteenth-century England for frivolous as well as useful goods and services foreshadows our own world.
In the third paragraph, the author is primarily concerned with______.
选项 A、contrasting two theses and offering a compromise
B、questioning two explanations and proposing a possible alternative to them
C、paraphrasing the work of two historians and questioning their assumptions
D、examining two theories and endorsing one over the other
答案B
解析 信息归纳题。文章第三段的首句中心句回答了“消费者为什么变得那么急于购物”的原因，接着提出了两个原因，“to advertise in a relatively uncensored press”制造商可以在无需审查的报刊上刊登广告：“conspicuous consumption stimulated by competition for status”社会地位的竞争引起一种引人注目的消费，之后作者质疑(wonder)这两种说法，并提出一种新的理由“enjoy buyingthings as a form of self一gratification”，即人们喜爱购物是一种自我满足的形式。归纳以上信息可知答案为B。
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