Last year nearly one million Americans filed for bankruptcy. That is far fewer than the number who used to seek bankruptcy prote

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问题    Last year nearly one million Americans filed for bankruptcy. That is far fewer than the number who used to seek bankruptcy protection before the law was made tougher a decade ago. This reform may have done more harm than good. The aim of bankruptcy law is to give people relief from unpayable debts. Some two-thirds of individual bankruptcies are due to a lost job. Many bankrupts need time to get back on their feet. In the mid-2000s Chapter 7 rules made it easy to wash away debts. That irritated credit-card firms, which claimed that spendthrifts abused the system; so in 2005 the law was toughened. The idea was to shift people to a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, where they would have to repay some of the debt.
   The reform had a big impact. At least at first, Chapter 13 filings rose relative to Chapter 7 ones. And a new paper, from Stefania Albanesi, of the New York Federal Reserve, and Jaromir Nosal, of Columbia University, finds that the reform led to a permanent drop in the bankruptcy rate.
   However, other recent research suggests that this is not necessarily a good thing. Will Dobbie, of Princeton University, and Jae Song, of the Social Security Administration, look at Chapter 13 bankruptcies before the reforms of 2005. They link half a million bankruptcy filings to tax records and use a novel technique to analyse them. Because some bankruptcy judges are more merciful than others, people in similar straits may end up with different bankruptcy decisions. This quirk allows some useful comparisons.
   Messrs Dobbie and Song argue that easier bankruptcy laws have good microeconomic effects. If a creditor may no longer claim large chunks of a bankrupt’s salary, that may increase his incentive to work—and decrease his need to slip out of town, change his job and close down his bank account. On average, those granted bankruptcy earned over 6,000 more in the subsequent year than similarly-placed plaintiffs who were rejected. The unlucky ones found it trickier to service their mortgages. Michelle White of the University of California, San Diego and colleagues found that bankruptcy reform caused the default rate on prime mortgages to rise 23%.
   Making consumer-bankruptcy law more debtor-friendly could hit Americans in other ways. If lenders are exposed to bigger losses, some argue, interest rates for such things as creditcards are bound to rise. But that danger can be overstated. Credit-card companies may be reluctant to charge rates higher than their competitors’ lest they attract more customers—those not put off by high rates because they know that, with luck, they won’t have to pay their debts back.
Credit-card firms were angry because______.

选项 A、legislators abused their authority
B、debtors controlled the law system
C、laws made it easy to pay off debts
D、some regulations did harm to them

答案D

解析 细节题。题干中Credit-card firms来自第一段倒数第三行;angry“愤怒”=irritated “激怒”;故本题答案句为:In the mid-2000s Chapter 7 rules made it easy to wash away debts.That irritated credit-card firms…其中that一词指代上一句的内容,即信用卡公司愤怒的原因。该句大意为“在21世纪中期,第7章规定有利于摆脱债务,这激怒了信用卡公司。”与该句同义替换的选项为[D]some regulations did harm to them“一些规定对他们不利”。选项[A]legislators abused their authority“立法者滥用职权”;该项与which claimed that spend-thrifts abused the system一句相关;但该句并非答案句,且legislator“立法者”与原文spend-thrifts“挥霍者”无关,故该项可以排除。选项[B]debtors controlled the law system“债务人控制了法律体系”;该项同样对应which claimed that spendthrifts abused the system一句,也非正确答案。选项[C]laws made it easy to pay off debts“法律使得偿还债务变简单了”;该项对应rules made it easy to wash away debts一句:其中pay off debts“偿还债务”与wash away debts“洗掉/摆脱债务”不等,属于偷换概念,故排除。综上,本题答案为[D]。
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