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  3. A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

admin2014-04-20  8
问题     A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to many people from Africa. A desire for freshwater fish in New Delhi is best satisfied by haggling for the freshest rohu with fishmongers in Chittaranjan Park, the heart of the city’s fish-loving Bengali community. Markets that serve migrants are not just great for gourmands. They are also testament to the fact that people often retain very strong preferences for the kinds of food they grew up eating.
    Past research has shown that people are often willing to pay much more for a favored brand than for seemingly identical alternatives. And the new study finds a clever way to test this idea. The researchers had data on the purchases of 238 kinds of packaged goods by 38,000 American families between 2006 and 2008. Among the people studied 16% were migrants; they had grown up in one state and moved to another. They had the same options, in terms of what was on offer and at what price, as everyone else in their adopted home. But although they consumed more local favorites than someone in their native state would have, they bought fewer local hits(and more of the favorites from back home)than a longtime resident. And this gap between the purchases of migrants and that of the locally born was stubborn: although it faded the longer a person lived in their new state, it still took 20 years to halve in magnitude. Even 50 years on, it was still large enough to show up in the data.
    If this is generally true, it has important implications. For one thing, the benefits of being the first brand into a market could last longer than might be assumed. But David Atkin of Yale University suggests in another new paper that the effects of habit formation in consumption may also lead economists to rethink the way they calculate the gains from trade. This is because opening up to trade is in some ways akin to migrating. It changes the composition and prices of the goods that are available to a person. In particular, it can raise the relative prices of the goods that a region or country has a comparative advantage in, such as crops that the country’s climate or soil favor. These are the things that would have been relatively cheap and common in a closed economy and therefore the things that people might have acquired a taste for. To the extent that such preferences persist, people will benefit less from the increased variety of goods and altered relative prices that trade brings about than they would do if habits were not a significant determinant of consumption.  
In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by______.
选项 A、exemplifying an assumption
B、making a comparison
C、explaining a phenomenon
D、posing a question
答案C
解析 篇章题。本题考查议论文谋篇方式和写作特点。作者在第一段中首先描述了两个场景，都与特殊的饮食文化有关，而在本段最后，又对此进行了简单地解释，指出这些现象体现出习惯的力量。而从第二段开始，作者将习惯的力量迁移至经济学领域。由此可见，开篇段落的作用是通过解释现象引出话题，故[C]为答案。四个选项中最易排除[D]项，因为文章并没有提出问题。而开篇部分还没有提出任何假设或论题，因此，[A]项exemplifying an assumption“例证某个假设”显然也是错误的。第一段虽然描述了两个现象，但它们的关系是并列的，作者也没有对其进行比较，故[B]项也是错误的。
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