考研英语历年阅读真题解析1994-1999.doc

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 ing disaster, a essful lawsuit pensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding panies 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 — 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 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 panies 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, essfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We're really sorry he has e 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 mendations carry substantial weight — issued new guidelines for tort law stating panies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important informa