Para. 1

　　tight-lipped (L1)

　　Para. 3

　　essential (L4)

　　Para. 4

　　account (L1)

　　Para. 5

　　wares (L5)

　　reasonably (L6)

　　Para. 6

　　inquiry (L3)

　　regarding (L3)

　　Text 2

　　It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes。

　　Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might — surprise! — fall off. The label on a child’s Batman cape cautions that the toy “does not enable user to fly。”

　　While warnings are often appropriate and necessary — the dangers of drug interactions, for example — and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn’t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court。

　　Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. “We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries,” says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’s injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute — a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight — issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. “Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities,” says a law professor at Cornell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability。

　　5.What were things like in 1980s when accidents happened?

　　[A] Customers might be relieved of their disasters through lawsuits。

　　[B] Injured customers could expect protection from the legal system。

　　[C] Companies would avoid being sued by providing new warnings。

　　[D] Juries tended to find fault with the compensations companies promised。

　　6.Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to ________。

　　[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products

　　[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products

　　[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability

　　[D] feel obliged to view customers’ safety as their first concern

　　7.The case of Schutt helmet demonstrated that ________。

　　[A] some injury claims were no longer supported by law

　　[B] helmets were not designed to prevent injuries

　　[C] product labels would eventually be discarded

　　[D] some sports games might lose popularity with athletes

　　8.The author’s attitude towards the issue seems to be ________

　　[A] biased                [B] indifferent

　　[C] puzzling               [D] objective

　　写出下列词汇(词组)在文章中的意思。

　　Para. 1

　　compensate (L3)

　　(be) liable for (L4)

　　Para. 2

　　anticipate (L2)

　　caution (L4)

　　Para. 3

　　regulation (L2)

　　Para. 4

　　side with (L2)

　　involve (L4)

　　triviality (L11)

　　Text 3

　　Good news for people who always fail to see the silver lining on clouds. A report in this month’s New Scientist, suggests that a tendency to get down when life beats you up can be good for you. A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental-health research are claiming that it isn’t a good idea to use antidepressants to help get rid of unhappiness in the consequence of a marriage breakdown, death or redundancy because, “they fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Sadness, serves an evolutionary purpose。”

　　Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University explains that depressive feelings are part of our biological makeup. “When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. I think that one of functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while。” While Paul Keedwell, psychiatrist at Cardiff University claims that even full-blown depression may have its purpose, saving the sufferer from the effects of long-term stress. Without a mental pause, he argues, “you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you’re exhausted or dead”。

　　Although, it is important to be careful when talking about depression, having the upside traced in your downside will have an irresistible appeal to all those who take the phrase “Cheer up. Love, it might never happen” as a personal insult. It will be manna especially for creative types, who will have long suspected that crying a lot was a sign of their inward genius. During test(微博)s at Harvard, the News Scientist reports, people with signs of depression performed better at a creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low mood. Although it is old-fashioned to claim that creativity is connected to gloomy moods and a grey outlook on life, all the best stuff is written by some grim-faced pencil chewer with a heart pumped by angst。

　　Richard Yates, whose novel Revolutionary Road is about to win an Oscar, has written seven novels and two collections of short stories, each more hopelessly miserable than the last. After years of accounting the impossibility of his toothless, drunken mother, his experiences in the second world war and divorces, Yates finally rounds things off in Disturbing the Peace by fictionalizing how a cocktail of alcoholism and psychotropic drugs had him take off his clothes and wander the streets of LA, giving all his money to beggars, convinced that he was Jesus. It is cruel-but so readable。

　　So, although the grand majority will never write anything as good as Yates, there is something to be gained from looking on the dark side. In a work environment, for example, disconnected people tend to achieve greater success than those of a sunny nature. It’s enough to make a pessimist dissolve into a Cheshire Cat grin。

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