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  3. Is Wal-Mart going wobbly? Over the past couple of weeks, America’s largest company--linchpin of the low-wage, no-benefit economy

Is Wal-Mart going wobbly? Over the past couple of weeks, America’s largest company--linchpin of the low-wage, no-benefit economy

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问题     Is Wal-Mart going wobbly? Over the past couple of weeks, America’s largest company--linchpin of the low-wage, no-benefit economy that is increasingly the norm in America--has announced some surprising reversals of course. In a series of speeches and interviews, chief executive H. Lee Scott unveiled four initiatives that he clearly hopes will polish the company’s increasingly tarnished image. Wal-Mart, he said, will shift to more environmentally responsible practices--demanding better packaging of its products. It will offer more affordable health insurance to its employees, cutting the monthly premium in some cases to just ＄11. It will monitor the environmental and health and safety practices of its foreign suppliers. And it will lobby for a higher federal minimum wage.
    Scott’s timing is anything but accidental. The sweatshop conditions in which thou-sands of employees of Wal-Mart’s suppliers routinely work, and the depressive effect that Wal-Mart has on working-class living standards here in the United States, are receiving increasing scrutiny--enough to impede the company’s growth. Wal-Mart’s at-tempts to open stores in the major cities of the Northeast and West Coast have been largely checked by a coalition of fearful and irate unions, smaller retailers, churches and liberal activists. Wal-Mart’s stock is down 13 percent this year. And worse is still to come. So the leopard realized it was time to change its spots-up to a point. Only 44 percent of Wal-Mart’s nearly 1. 3 million U.S. employees are covered under its health insurance plan. Now the company says it will make its insurance more affordable.
    Of all Scott’s commitments, the one that does merit belief is his out-of-the-blue declaration of support for a higher minimum wage. For Wal-Mart is bumping up against a serious problem at least partly of its own making: Because it pitches its products to a disproportionately low-income client, its revenue rises and falls with the fortunes of the lower end of the American working class. And those fortunes these days are anything but bright. The coming crunch in heating oil prices, the decimation of American manufacturing, the steady decline of median family incomes over the past several years, the failure to raise the federal minimum wage since 1997--all these are combining to limit the ability of Wal-Mart shoppers to buy as much as they used to.
    Wal-Mart, could, of course, raise its workers’ wages, but Scott has dismissed that out of hand. So now it’s the feds’ responsibility to rescue Wal-Mart from the consequences of the low-wage, low-consumption economy that Wal-Mart, with such fanatical devotion, has created. For, in Wal-Mart’s America, it’s not clear that even Wal-Mart can thrive.
The word "impede" (Line 4, Para. 2) most probably means ______ .
选项 A、restrict
B、regain
C、expand
D、retain
答案A
解析 我们读完前文发现前面提到很多不好的事件可以判断出impede的含义是A“限制，约束”。
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