1995年Passage l

Money spent on advertising is money spent as well as any I know of. It serves directly to assist a rapid distribution of goods at reasonable price, thereby establishing a firm home market and so making it possible to provide for export at competitive prices. By drawing attention to new ideas it helps enormously to raise standards of living. By helping to increase demand it ensures an increased need for labour, and is therefore an effective way to fight unemployment. It lowers the costs of many services: without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much, the price of your television license would need to be doubled, and travel by bus or tube would cost 20 per cent more.

And perhaps most important of all, advertising provides a guarantee of reasonable value in the products and services you buy. Apart from the fact that twenty-seven acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising, no regular advertiser dare promote a product that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements. He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising. He will not do so for long, for mercifully the public has the good sense not to buy the inferior article more than once. If you see an article consistently advertised, it is the surest proof I know that the article does what is claimed for it , and that it represents good value.

Advertising does more for the material benefit of the community than any other force I can think of.

There is one more point I feel I ought to touch on. Recently I heard a well-known television personality declare that he was against advertising because it persuades rather than informs. He was drawing excessively fine distinctions. Of course advertising seeks to persuade.

If its message were confined merely to information-and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive----advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention. But perhaps that is what the well-known television personality wants.

54. In the author's opinion,__.
[A]advertising can seldom bring material benefit to man by providing information
[B]advertising informs people of new ideas rather than wins them over
[C]there is nothing wrong with advertising in persuading the buyer
[D]the buyer is not interested in getting information from an advertisement

[答案] C

[解題思路]

本題對應于文章最后一段，該段第一句話指出"If its message were confined merely to information-and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive----advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention"（如果廣告內容僅限于提供信息--這件事如果不是不可能，也很難實現，因為即使是對于襯衫顏色的挑選也具有一些勸誘性--那么廣告將會變得非常索然無味，甚至沒有人會注意到它），這是對那位電視名人的反駁，因而說明作者認為廣告試圖說服人們購買產品并不是一個問題，因此正確答案為C選項。B選項與原文意思相反，而A和D選項的表述在原文中沒有提及。

[題目譯文]

在作者看來，           。
[A]廣告幾乎不能通過提供信息給人們帶來物質上的好處
[B]廣告訴人們的是新想法，而不是要贏得他們
[C]通過廣告來說服人們購買產品并沒有什么過錯
[D]買東西的人對于從廣告中得到信息并不感興趣