1999年考研阅读文章精读.pdf

1999 年考研阅读文章精读 2 Text 1 It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg 4 slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, 6 a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more 8 companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes. Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning 10 labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you 12 might -- surprise! -- fall off. The label on a child’s Batman cape cautions that the toy “does not enable user to fly.” 14 While warnings are often appropriate and necessary -- the dangers of drug interactions, for example -- and many are required by state or federal 16 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 18 companies lose when injured customers take them to court. Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as 20 before, some courts are beginning to side with defendant s, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything. In 22 May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully 1 / 9 fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game 2 while wearing a Schutt helmet. “We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries,”