题目内容
？Read the following extract from an article about monopolistic competition, and the questions followed.
？For each question 15—20, mark one letter (A, B, C, or D) on your Answer Sheet for the answer you choose.
Is the outcome in a monopolistically competitive market desirable from the standpoint of society as a whole？ Can policymakers improve on the market outcome？ There are no simple answers to these questions.
One source of inefficiency is the markup of price over marginal cost. Because of the markup, some consumers who value the good at more than the marginal cost of production (but less than the price) will be deterred from buying it. Thus, a monopolistically competitive market has the normal deadweight loss of monopoly pricing.
Although this outcome is clearly undesirable compared to the first-best outcome of price equal to marginal cost, there is no easy way for policymakers to fix the problem. To enforce marginal-cost pricing, policymakers would need to regulate all firms that produce differentiated products. Because such products are so common in the economy, the administrative burden of such regulation would be overwhelming. Moreover, the regulating monopolistic competitors would entail all the problems of regulating natural monopolies. In particular, because monopolistic competitors are making zero profits already, requiring them [% lower their prices to equal marginal cost would cause them to make losses. To keep these firms in business, the government would need to help them cover these losses. Rather than raising taxes to pay for these subsidies, policymakers may decide it is better to live with the inefficiency of monopolistic pricing.
Another way in which monopolistic competition may be socially inefficient is that the number of firms in the market may not be the "ideal" one. That is, there may be too much or too little entry. One way to think about this problem is in terms of the externalities associated with entry. Whenever a new firm considers entering the market with a new product, it considers only the profit it would make. Yet its entry would also have two external effects: a) The product-variety externality: Because consumers get some consumer surplus from the introduction of a new product, there is a positive externality associated with entry; b) The business-stealing externality: Because other firms lose customers and profits from the entry of a new competitor, there is a negative externality associated with entry. Thus in a monopolistically competitive market, there are both positive and negative externalities associated with the entry of new firms. Depending on which externality is larger, a monopolistically competitive market could have either too few or too many products. Both of these externalities are closely related to the conditions for monopolistic competition. The former arises because a new firm would offer a product different from those of the existing firms. The latter arises because firms post a price above marginal cost and, therefore, are always eager to sell additional units. Conversely, because perfectly competitive firms produce identical goods and charge a price equal to marginal cost, neither of these externalities exists under perfect competition.
In the end, we can conclude only that monopolistically competitive markets do not have all the desirable welfare properties of perfectly competitive markets. That is, the invisible hand does not ensure that total surplus is maximized under monopolistic competition. Yet because the inefficiencies are subtle, hard to measure, and hard to fix, there is no easy way for public policy to improve the market outcome.
Who will be prevented from buying the good？
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A．bringingB．obtainingC．gainingD．purchasing
There are many ways of dealing with offenders that do not involve the payment of money. One is probation, a system that takes many different forms in different jurisdictions but that essentially involves the suspension of sentence on the offender subject to the condition that he is supervised while living in the community by a probation officer and possibly agrees to comply with such other requirements as the court many think appropriate. Usually, if the offender complies with the probation order and commits no further offense while it is in force, no other penalty is imposed, but if he breaks the requirement of the order or commits another offense, he can be brought back before the court and punished for the original offense as well as the later one. In many U.S. states probation is combined with a suspended sentence, so that the sentence the offender will have to serve if he breaks the order is fixed in advance; in England the sentence is not fixed in advance, and the court has complete discretion if there is a breach to sentence the offender for the original crime in light of his later behaviour English law allows suspended sentence of of imprisonment for a specified period (not more than two years), on condition that the offender commit no further offense during the period of suspension. This is different from a probation order, as no supervision is required and no other conditions may be included in the order.
Other alternatives to prison are based on the idea of preventing an offender from committing further offenses, without necessarily confining him in a prison. The most familiar power of this kind is that of disqualifying an offender from driving a motor vehicle or from holding a driver's license. This power is available under the laws of most countries to deal with those offenders who either commit serious driving offenses, such as driving while intoxicated, or who commit repeated but less serious offenses, such as speeding. In many countries there exists a system in which the offender is awarded a number of poims each time he commits a motoring offense; when the number of points accumulated reaches a certain figure, he is automatically disqualified for a specified period. Some countries allow courts to disqualify from driving those offenders who have used motor vehicles in commission of the crime for which they are being sentenced, with the aim of hindering the offender from committing further such offenses. Although attractive in the abstract, this seldom works well in practice, as the absence of a driver's license may well prevent an offender from finding work after release from prison; as a result he may be likely to commit further crimes. Other forms of disqualification may be imposed on offenders convicted of particular types of crimes: a fraudulent company director may be disqualified from being involved in the direction of a company, a corrupt politician may be disqualified from holding public office, or a parent who sexually abuses his children may be deprived of parental authority over them.
The first paragraph is primarily about ______.
One of the advantages of flexible working hours is that
Theories are like apples; there are good ones and there are bad ones. A good apple is flavorful and nutritious. A good theory is one that we have good reason to believe is true, or at least likely to be true. Apples have all sorts of features that are indicative of goodness and that can be used at the store for making smart choices. An apple's color, shininess, shape, and firmness are related to its flavor and food value. Similarly, theories have features that are indicative of their truth, and the task of justification is to identify these features and use them to guide choices as to which theories to believe. In this way, responsible theory choice and responsible science are not unlike responsible shopping. The big difference is that you get to go home and eat the apple and find out if you were right and it really does taste good. With theories, however, there is no feature that is the taste of truth, at least not that we get to sample. There are only features that indicate truth. You never get to go home and see unambiguously that atomic theory, for example, is true. But you do the best you can.
Theories have lots of different properties and can differ one from another in a variety of different ways. A few have been mentioned already, namely the degree of generality and hypothetical status of a theoretical claim. An account of the properties of a theory is an answer to the inquiry, "So tell me what this theory is like." There are plenty of things to say, that is, plenty of features to mention. There is the feature of how it was discovered, by whom, at what time of day. Some theories have the feature of being proposed by Einstein; some lack his feature. Some have the feature of being liked by Einstein; some don't. There are also features of the content of a theory or of its form. Being logically consistent is a feature of form. Making reference to action at a distance, or to evil spirits, or to gluons are distinct features of content. There are even pragmatic features. Some theories are likely to be money-makers; others are not.
Clearly, some of these features of theories are irrelevant to an analysis of scientific knowledge and irrelevant to doing science. We want to focus on the important features, those that meet the following two criteria. First, they must be relevant to the likelihood of the theory being true. That is, they must be reliable indicators of truth so that our seeing whether the feature is present or not will be part of our warrant for believing the theory. Some theories have the property that you learned them on a Tuesday, but that is unimportant because it is neutral to their being true or false. Some theories have the property of describing goblin maintenance men to keep the world in good working order. That's an important feature because it helps us decide whether the theory is true or false.
The second criterion of importance is that the property is something we can in fact evaluate. The information must be accessible to us if it is to be of any use. To get back to apples for a moment, even if it's true that apples with darker seeds taste better, this isn't any help there in the store where information about the seeds isn't available. Similarly, a theory about the demise of dinosaurs is true if it is an accurate picture of the past events, but the feature of being an accurate picture is not something we can evaluate. We can't see what this theory is a picture of, and so we can't assess its accuracy. Much as we would like to use accuracy-of-picture or correspondence-to-facts as features that indicate truth, information about these features is unavailable. Features that are important to the justification of theories must be both truth-conducive and accessible.
Which of the following can serve as one of the reasons to support the idea that theories are like apples？
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