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  3. Of all the goods and services traded in the market economy, pharmaceuticals are perhaps the most contentious. Though produced by

Of all the goods and services traded in the market economy, pharmaceuticals are perhaps the most contentious. Though produced by

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问题     Of all the goods and services traded in the market economy, pharmaceuticals are perhaps the most contentious. Though produced by private companies, they constitute a public good, both because they can prevent epidemics and because healthy people function better as members of society than sick ones do. They carry a moral weight that most privately traded goods do not, for there is a widespread belief that people have a right to health care.
    Innovation accounts for most of the cost of production, so the price of drugs is much higher than their cost of manufacture, making them unaffordable to many poor people. Firms protect the intellectual property(IP)that drugs represent and sue those who try to manufacture and sell patented drugs cheaply. For all these reasons, pharmaceutical companies are widely regarded as vampires who exploit the sick and ignore the sufferings of the poor.
    These criticisms reached a summit more than a decade ago at the peak of the HIV plague. When South Africa’s government sought to legalise the import of cheap generic copies of patented AIDS drugs, pharmaceutical companies took it to court. The case earned the nickname " Big Pharma v Nelson Mandela". It was a low point for the industry, which wisely backed down.
    Now arguments over drugs pricing are rising again. Activists are suing to block the patenting in India of a new Hepatitis C drug that has just been approved by American regulators. Other clashes are breaking out, in countries from Brazil to Britain. But the main battlefield is the Trans-Pacific Partnership(TPP), a proposed trade deal between countries in Asia and the Americas. The parties have yet to reach an agreement, partly because of the drug-pricing question.
    Under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, a deal signed in 1994, governments can allow a generic drugmaker to produce a patented medicine. America—home of most of the world’s big pharma, whose consumers pay the world’s highest prices for drugs-—wants to use the TPP to restrict such compulsory licences to infectious diseases, while emerging-market countries want to make it harder for drug firms to win patents.
    The reoccurrence of conflict over drug pricing is the result not of a sudden emergency, but of broad, long-term changes. Rich countries want to slash health costs. In emerging markets, people are living longer and getting rich-country diseases. This is boosting demand for drugs for cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases. In emerging markets, governments want to expand access to treatment , but drugs already account for a large share of health-care spending. Meanwhile, a wave of innovation is producing expensive new treatments.
The main idea of Paragraph 4 is______.
选项 A、battles in medical field
B、cases of patented drugs
C、conflicts among countries
D、brawl over medicine price
答案D
解析 该题是段落主旨题，询问某段落大意。一般某段的大意常常体现在第一句或最后一句，或者该段中反复出现的一些中心词上。第四段首句提到：Now arguments over drugs pricing are rising again．(如今关于药价的争论又升温了。)接着提到世界各地关于药价问题的冲突，最后一句再次提到The parties have yet to reach an agreement，partly because of the drug-pricing question．可见该段的主旨信息是drug-pricing药价，故该题答案为[D]项brawl over medicine price(关于药价的争吵)。
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