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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  4
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.  
The second paragraph suggest that the migrants______.
选项 A、appear to be more homesick than the local residents
B、tend to differ from the longtime residents in favorite goods
C、refuse to accept the culture of their adopted home
D、are too stubborn to change their consumption habits
答案B
解析 推断题。本题准确把握第二段中介绍的经济学研究发现。根据本段所述，与久居该州的居民相比，移民者购买当地产品较少，而购买其原籍的商品更多。可见，他们与当地居民所偏爱的商品有所不同，可见[B]项正确。四个选项中可首先排除[A]项，该项话题与本文主题无关。[C]项属于过度推断，尽管在消费习惯上有所不同，也不能因此说移居者拒绝接受当地文化，故[C]项也可排除。[D]项“移花接木”，将原文形容消费习惯的词“stubborn”转嫁到移居者身上，这显然也不符合原文意义。
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