考研英语历年阅读真题解析.docx

1999 Passage 1
It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg 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, 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'
misfortune s.
Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate
every possible accident. Today, stepladder s carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might — surprised! — 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 interaction s, for example — and many are required by state or federal regulation s, 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 defendant s, 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. They 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 recommendation s carry substantial weight — issued new guideline s for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or