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 network company startups and in the names of sports complexes. Brands are infiltrating (渗透) 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(小亭) in elementary school lunchrooms. But as brands reach (and then overreach) into every aspects 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 citizenships" says author and activists Naomi Klien. "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.  
Why do the institutions want to partner with private companies?

选项 A、The massive expansion of marketing campaigns has taken place.
B、They want to infuse people with marketing ideas.
C、They want to be market-oriented institutions.
D、Government spending on the institutions is greatly curtailed.

答案D

解析 推断题 。最后一段第一句指出,20世纪80年代市场营销活动大规模扩张的同时,政府对学校和博物馆的投入削减。第二句接着指出这一现象带来的后果:教育机构非常愿意,甚至渴望与私人企业开展合作。所以D项“政府对教育机构的投人大幅度减少”就是教育机构希望与私人公司合作的原因,为本题的正确答案。
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