原文+翻译：
It’s a rough world out there.
外面是一个危险的世界。
Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat.
迈出家门时，你可能会滑倒在门垫上，而摔伤一条腿。
Light up the stove and you could burn down the house.
点燃炉灶时，你可能会把房子烧掉。
Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles.
不过还算幸运的是，如果门垫或炉灶上没有警示语提醒你可能发生的危险，那么一场成功的诉讼或许可以补偿你所受的伤害。
Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes.
这种想法大约自20世纪80年代初开始传播，那时陪审团开始认为更多的公司应对其客户所遭受的不幸负责。
Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident.
由于感到了威胁，公司方面做出了反应：写出越来越长的警示语，力图预先标明种种可能发生的事故。
Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might -- surprise! -- fall off. The label on a child’s Batman cape cautions that the toy “does not enable user to fly.”
如今，活梯上贴着几英寸长的警告标签，除了其他警告事项外，还警告你可能会摔下来，简直是莫名其妙！贴在儿童的蝙蝠侠披风上的标签也告诫说，本玩具“无法让用户飞行”。
While warnings are often appropriate and necessary -- the dangers of drug interactions, for example -- and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn’t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
虽然警示语常常是合理而必要的（如警告药物有相互作用的危险），并且很多是州或联邦法规所要求的，但是当消费者受伤时，这些警示语能否真正保护制造商和销售商使之免于承担责任，却还很难说,被受伤的消费者告上法庭的公司中，大约一半会败诉。
Now the tide appears to be turning.
现在这种趋势似乎正在转变。
As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything.
尽管个人伤害索赔案件如以往一样不断发生，但有些法庭已开始站到被告一方，特别是在处理那些有警告标签也可能无法避免伤害的案件时。
In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet.
五月份,伊利诺斯州的Schutt体育公司总裁朱利·尼蒙斯就成功地打赢了这样一场官司。一名橄榄球队员戴着该公司的头盔在一场比赛中受伤瘫痪，遂将该公司告上法庭。
“We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries,” says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’s injury.
尼蒙斯说：“他成了瘫痪，我们非常难过，但我们设计头盔不是为了预防这类伤害的。”陪审团也认为造成该运动员受伤的是这项运动本身的危险性，而不是头盔。
At the same time, the American Law Institute -- a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight -- issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones.
与此同时，美国法学会——一群说话举足轻重的法官、律师、学者——发布了新的侵权法指导原则，宣布公司不必警示顾客那些显而易见的危险，或者给顾客列出一份冗长的可能遇到的危险的清单。
“Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities,” says a law professor at Cornell law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.
康奈尔大学法学院一位参与起草新指导原则的教授说，“重要的信息会淹没在细枝末节的汪洋之中”。如果该法律团体的这一适中的目标能够实现，产品上提供的警示信息就不再是为回避法律责任而设，而是为保护消费者利益而提供了。
试题：
51. What were things like in 1980s when accidents happened?
[A] Customers might be relieved of their disasters through lawsuits.
[B] Injured customers could expect protection from the legal system.
[C] Companies would avoid being sued by providing new warnings.
[D] Juries tended to find fault with the compensations companies promised.
52. Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to.
[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products
[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products
[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability
[D] feel obliged to view customers’ safety as their first concern
53. The case of Schutt helmet demonstrated that.
[A] some injury claims were no longer supported by law
[B] helmets were not designed to prevent injuries
[C] product labels would eventually be discarded
[D] some sports games might lose popularity with athletes
54. The author’s attitude towards the issue seems to be.
[A] biased
[B] indifferent
[C] puzzling
[D] objective
答案：
B C A D
