It’s a brand new world—a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re

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问题     It’s a brand new world—a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re on supermarket shelves, of course, but also in business plans for dotcom startups and in the names of sports complexes. Brands are infiltrating people’s everyday lives—by sticking their logos on clothes, in concert programs, on subway-station walls, even in elementary-school classrooms.
    We live in an age in which CBS newscasters wear Nike jackets on the air, in which Burger King and McDonald’s open kiosks in elementary-school lunchrooms, in which schools like Stanford University are endowed with a Yahoo! Founders Chair. But as brands reach(and then overreach)into every aspect of our lives, the companies behind them invite more questions, deeper scrutiny—and an inevitable backlash by consumers.
    "Our intellectual lives and our public spaces are being taken over by marketing—and that has real implications for citizenship," says author and activist Naomi Klein. "It’s important for any healthy culture to have public space—a place where people are treated as citizens instead of as consumers. We’ve completely lost that space."
    Since the mid-1980s, as more and more companies have shifted from being about products to being about ideas—Starbucks isn’t selling coffee; it’s selling community!—those companies have poured more and more resources into marketing campaigns.
    To pay for those campaigns, those same companies figured out ways to cut costs elsewhere— for example, by using contract labor at home and low-wage labor in developing countries. Contract laborers are hired on a temporary, per-assignment basis, and employers have no obligation to provide any benefits(such as health insurance)or long-term job security. This saves companies money but obviously puts workers in vulnerable situations. In the United States, contract labor has given rise to so-called McJobs, which employers and workers alike pretend are temporary—even though these jobs are usually held by adults who are trying to support families.
    The massive expansion of marketing campaigns in the 1980s coincided with the reduction of government spending for schools and for museums. This made those institutions much too willing, even eager, to partner with private companies. But companies took advantage of the needs of those institutions, reaching too far, and overwhelming the civic space with their marketing agendas.
The text suggests that most contract laborers in the U. S.______.

选项 A、pretend to be part-time workers
B、may have trouble supporting their families financially
C、have work conditions comparable to those of low-wage workers overseas
D、are likely to receive health benefits from their employers

答案B

解析 属信息推断题。题目中的关键词contract laborer出现在第五段第二句,该句大意为:合同工是根据工作量雇用的临时工,雇主没有义务提供任何福利待遇(如健康保险)或长期的工作保障。接下来的句子清楚地表明了这将会带来的问题:这种方法让公司省了钱,而工人却明显地处于弱势地位。……尽管打“麦克工”的人大都是想要养家糊口的成年人。由此可推知选项B“在养家糊口方面有问题”正确。选项A、C(文中根本没有二者的比较)无法推出,而选项D与第五段第二句内容相反。
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