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  3. A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to m

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问题     A Londoner with an urge for giant African land snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, home to many people from Africa. A desire for freshwater fish in New Delhi is best satisfied by haggling for the freshest rohu with fishmongers in Chittaranjan Park, the heart of the city’s fish-loving Bengali community. Markets that serve migrants are not just great for gourmands. They are also testament to the fact that people often retain very strong preferences for the kinds of food they grew up eating.
    Past research has shown that people are often willing to pay much more for a favored brand than for seemingly identical alternatives. And the new study finds a clever way to test this idea. The researchers had data on the purchases of 238 kinds of packaged goods by 38,000 American families between 2006 and 2008. Among the people studied 16% were migrants; they had grown up in one state and moved to another. They had the same options, in terms of what was on offer and at what price, as everyone else in their adopted home. But although they consumed more local favorites than someone in their native state would have, they bought fewer local hits(and more of the favorites from back home)than a longtime resident. And this gap between the purchases of migrants and that of the locally born was stubborn: although it faded the longer a person lived in their new state, it still took 20 years to halve in magnitude. Even 50 years on, it was still large enough to show up in the data.
    If this is generally true, it has important implications. For one thing, the benefits of being the first brand into a market could last longer than might be assumed. But David Atkin of Yale University suggests in another new paper that the effects of habit formation in consumption may also lead economists to rethink the way they calculate the gains from trade. This is because opening up to trade is in some ways akin to migrating. It changes the composition and prices of the goods that are available to a person. In particular, it can raise the relative prices of the goods that a region or country has a comparative advantage in, such as crops that the country’s climate or soil favor. These are the things that would have been relatively cheap and common in a closed economy and therefore the things that people might have acquired a taste for. To the extent that such preferences persist, people will benefit less from the increased variety of goods and altered relative prices that trade brings about than they would do if habits were not a significant determinant of consumption.  
Opening up to trade resembles migrating in the way that______.
选项 A、they relate to the formation of habits
B、they change the prices of goods
C、they cause the miscalculation of trade gains
D、they are the effect of established brands
答案A
解析 细节题。本题的解答要求深人理解作者在第二段和第三段中所做的阐述。作者在第二段中介绍了移居者受固有消费习惯持久影响的研究发现。而第三段中在关键句“开放贸易在某些方面与移居相似”之后，则说明了开放贸易开展也与改变或形成习惯有关。因此，两者的相似性在于与消费习惯的形成相关，故[A]为答案。首先可排除[C]项，根据原文，与贸易收益核算相关的既不是开放贸易，也不是移居行为，而是消费习惯影响的持久性，故[C]项与题干中任何一个比较对象均不相关。[B]项“改变商品价格”是开放贸易的结果，与移居行为无关，也应排除。而[D]项“显示已确立品牌的影响”，这两者虽然从经济学角度来讲都与品牌有关，但说开放贸易和移居是其表现不符合逻辑，[D]项错误。
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