1994年Passage 1

　　The American economic system is organized around a basically private-enterprise, market-oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most. Private businessmen, striving to make profits, produce these goods and services in competition with other businessmen; and the profit motive, operating under competitive pressures, largely determines how these goods and services are produce[D] Thus, in the American economic system it is the demand of individual consumers, coupled with the desire of businessmen to maximize profits and the desire of individuals to maximize their incomes, that together determine what shall be produced and how resources are used to produce it.

　　An important factor in a market-oriented economy is the mechanism by which consumer demands can be expressed and responded to by producers. In the American economy, this mechanism is provided by a price system, a process in which prices rise and fall in response to relative demands of consumers and supplies offered by seller-producers. If the product is in short supply relative to the demand, the price will be bid up and some consumers will be eliminated from the market. If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in turn will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product. Thus, price is the regulating mechanism in the American economic system.

　　The important factor in a private-enterprise economy is that individuals are allowed to own productive resources (private property) , and they are permitted to hire labor, gain control over natural resources, and produce goods and services for sale at a profit. In the American economy, the concept of private property embraces not only the ownership of productive resources but also certain rights, including the right to determine the price of a product or to make a free contract with another private individual.

54. The passage is mainly about__.
[A] how American goods are produced
[B] how American consumers buy their goods
[C] how American economic system works
[D] how American businessmen make their profits

[答案] C

[解題思路]

　　本文的第一句話就直截了當地說明了文章的中心思想，即"The American economic system is organized around a basically private-enterprise, market-oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most"（ 從根本上說，美國經濟體制是圍繞私有企業、在以市場為導向的經濟基礎上建立起來的。在這種體制下需要生產什么在很大程度上是消費者通過到市場花錢購買他們最需要的商品和服務來決定的），文章最后兩段隨即就美國經濟體系運作的兩個方面進行討論，因此正確答案為C選項。

[題目譯文]

本文的主要是關于               。
[A] 美國的產品是如何生產的
[B] 美國的顧客是如何購買產品的
[C] 美國的經濟體系是如何運作的
[D] 美國的商人是如何取得利潤的