单选题 I see this principal all over as I go through my day. I see rims on car wheels that cost upwards of $ 500, just for a little bit of decoration on a vehicle. I see people spend four or five dollars for a cup of coffee, hundreds of dollars for cell phones that they almost never use, thousands of dollars on huge television sets that they almost never watch. All around us are ads and commercials that keep us wanting to buy things that keep us dissatisfied with the way things are, and those ads and commercials are trying to convince us that if we just buy some more stuff—no matter what the cost—we'll be happier and more content.
But somewhere along the line we have to learn to make our own decisions about value. There's a common law of economics that states that many poor people will stay poor because of the decisions that they make about how to spend their money. How many people have you known or known of, for example, who have little money yet who buy a very expensive car with high monthly payments? And how many people are in trouble right now because they bought houses that were more expensive than they could afford?
While I wouldn't say that the answer to our money issues would be to skimp and save every penny and never have any fun in life, it is important that we learn about value and about when to spend how much. A few years ago, for example, my wife and I had cell phones. At the time I worked half an hour from home, I was on the road with sports teams a lot, and my wife also was on the road quite a bit. The cell phones made sense, even though we didn't use them much—at least we knew that if anything happened, we could contact one another.
Then we moved someplace where we didn't need the phones any more, for we both worked close to one another and we weren't on the road much. Suddenly, the $75 every month to keep the phones made no sense, so we got rid of them. They were now just a luxury item, no longer as necessary as they were before. They simply didn't have the same value that they had had before. And even though it had been quite convenient to make an occasional phone call from wherever I happened to be, that convenience was no longer worth the amount of money we would have had to pay to maintain it.
The best that we can do is to learn to define the value of our money for ourselves and to exchange our money for goods and services that have equal or even greater value. Money is here, and it's a part of our lives. We can live with it and have it work for us, or we can squander it and lose it and become angry and frustrated with our loss. The choice is ours, but one thing is for sure—the path to happiness doesn't lie in exchanging our money for goods or services of little value; rather, we need to make sure that the money we spend is money well spent. Only then can we avoid the resentment and frustration that will come over having wasted money when we didn't need to.

单选题 We can learn from the first paragraph that ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】推理题。从第一段我们可以看出,人们在金钱上的“慷慨出手”是因为受到生活中各种宣传和不良风气影响,是缺少正确的用金钱来换取物有所值商品的观念而导致的结果,故选B。
单选题 What can be inferred from the common law of economics (the second paragraph)?
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】推理题。第二段中的经济学法则说明,过度消费是财政危机的一个诱因。故选C。
单选题 The author gave up the convenience of making phones wherever he wants because ______.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】细节题。第四段中提到不用手机是因为不像以前那么必要了,dispensable为“可有可无”的意思,故选D,其他为干扰项。
单选题 Which of the following is in agreement with the author's way of spending money?
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】推理题。作者反对过度消费,倡导理性消费,所以C项正确。文章没有说要一味节约,所以A项不对;B项和作者的适度消费理念不符,不选;D项意欲放弃所有奢侈品,和作者本意不符,故排除。
单选题 Which might be the most appropriate title for the passage?
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】主旨题。文章最后一段讲到:“The best that we can do is to learn to define the value of our money for ourselves and to exchange our money. for goods and services that have equal or even greater value.”点名了文章主旨,面对商业社会中的种种物质诱惑,我们要明了价值的真谛,从而做出明智的选择,故B为最佳题目。