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  3. Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

admin2013-07-11  48
问题                 Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession?
    People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the October 1929 stock market crash and lasted until the United States entered World War II. It is a vivid story of year upon year of despair. This Depression narrative, however, is not merely a story about the past: it has started to inform our current expectations .
    According to the Reuters—University of Michigan Survey of Consumers earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of consumers expected that the present downturn would last for five more years. President Obama, in his first press conference, evoked the Depression in warning of a "negative spiral" that "becomes difficult for us to get out of" and suggested the possibility of a " lost decade" as in Japan in the1990s. He said Congress needed to pass an economic stimulus package.
    The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation. But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation—because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our "animal spirits" reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popular response to vivid accounts of past depressions is partly psychological, but it has a rational base. We have to look at past episodes because economic theory, lacking the physical constants of the hard sciences, has never offered a complete account of the mechanics of depressions.
    To understand the story’s significance in driving our thinking, it is important to recognize that the Great Depression itself was partly driven by the retelling of earlier depression stories. In the 1930s, there was incessant talk about the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s: each of those downturns lasted for the better part of a decade.
    In his influential 1909 book, "Forty Years of American Finance," Alexander Dana Noyes argued that the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s might have lasted much longer, except for accidents of history—a " European famine and a bumper crop at home " which stimulated the domestic economy through its agricultural sector. Early in the Depression, Forrest Davis worried in "What Price Wall Street?" that weakness after the panic of 1907 might have led to a prolonged depression if not for the accident of the World War. In 1932, a review of this book in The Times mourned that Mr. Davis had given us "no especial assurance that any of the traditional accidents can save us once more. The last war showed how terrible the next war will he."
    Should President Obama have reinforced the Great Depression story? Perhaps he had to take that risk to promote the economic stimulus plan, and not just hope for some accident to save us. The story was already embedded in our consciousness, and will be with us until we see a real, solid boost from the stimulus package and its likely successors.
The text conveys the idea that _____.
选项 A、History tends to repeat itself
B、Depressions are irremediable
C、Experience helps to find a way out
D、Pessimism strengthens disasters
答案D
解析 本题考查全文主旨。文中作者谈到了当前存在的一种现象：各地的人们都在谈论大萧条。作者认为谈论大萧条在无形中会使目前的经济形势朝着大萧条的趋势发展。为了更好地说明谈论大萧条带给人们的负面影响，作者又举例说明了谈论大萧条之前的经济衰退对大萧条的形成所造成的影响。最后一段提到人们不应该总沉浸在谈论大萧条的悲观情绪中，而应该采取行动促进经济的发展。因此全文的中心思想是谈论大萧条会产生消极悲观情绪，从而使经济形势更加恶化，[D]正确。文章并非强调经济形式的周期性或难以克服性，排除[A]、[B]。文中只提到“对以往经济危机的谈论，以及这些谈论所伴随的人们的悲观情绪加重了目前的经济萧条”，而没有涉及“以往的应对经济萧条的经验对克服目前经济危机的帮助”，排除[C]。
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