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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  49
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.
What is the best title for this text?
选项 A、The Mournful Decline of Postal Service
B、The Shaky Mail under Internet Shock
C、The Declining standards in the Postal World
D、The Self-destructive Privileges in Mail Delivery
答案D
解析 本文前三段介绍邮政业日益衰落的现象，第四、五段分析衰落的原因，指出邮政业的衰落是因为其拥有太多特权，导致其缺乏竞争力。末段进而提出建议：若想振兴邮政业，必须打破这些特权，引入竞争机制。可见[D]选项是对文章主要内容的概括。
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