单选题
The classic American identity theft scam works like this:
the thief convinces some bank or credit card company he's actually you and
borrows God knows how many dollars in your name. Once you discover and report
this, you're not liable for money the bank lost, but neither are you entitled to
compensation for the time and effort you spend straightening the matter out.
Bear in mind that when I say "the thief convinces the bank he's you", I'm not
talking about a brilliant actor and master of disguise who imitates your voice
and mannerisms well enough to fool your own mother. No, all that's necessary to
fool a bank is your birth date and US social security number, or just discarded
credit card offer taken from your bin. Why are lenders so
careless with their money? The snarky answer is: because they know taxpayers
will bail them out. But identity theft was a problem in America long before
phrases like "too big to fail" entered our vocabulary, I became an
identity-theft statistic nine years ago, when I opened my mail to find a bill
for a maxed-out credit card I never knew I had. I spent over two weeks cleaning
the mess: filing police reports, calling the company, sitting on hold, getting
disconnected and calling back to sit on hold again. Considering my salary back
then, I spent over a thousand dollars' worth of my time — and wasn't entitled to
a penny in damages. It all could easily have been avoided, had
the company made a minimal effort to ensure they were loaning money to me rather
than my dishonest doppelganger. So why didn't they? Because that would take time
— at least a day or two. And if people had to wait a day between applying for
and receiving credit, on-the-spot loans would be impossible. Every major retail
chain in America pushes these offers: "Apply for a store credit card and receive
15% off your first purchase!" From the lenders' perspective, writing off a few
bad ID-theft debts is cheaper than losing the lucrative "impulse buyer"
market. But that would change if companies had to pay damages
to identity theft victims. Should they have to? The supreme court of the state
of Maine is currently pondering that question. In March 2008 the Hannaford
supermarket chain announced that hackers broke into their database and stole the
credit card information of over 4 million customers, some of whom sued Hannaford
for damages. None of the customers lost money, of course, but they felt — as I
did — that their time and effort are worth something too. It's
too early to know how the court will rule, but I'll make a prediction anyway:
nothing will change from the consumers' perspective, and protecting lenders from
their own bad habits will continue to be our unpaid job. When the worldwide
economic meltdown started, I naively thought the subsequent tightening of credit
lines would at least make identity theft less of a problem than before. But I
was just being silly.
单选题
After suffering from identity theft,
A. you should pay for money the bank lost.
B. you are required to report to your bank immediately.
C. you have to assume the cost of getting your identity back.
单选题
By saying "too big to fail" (Line 3, Para.2), the author implies that
A. lenders are so big that they couldn't fail at all.
B. lenders won't pay for their careless loaning.
C. lenders are big enough to pay for any large loans.
D. America is big enough to solve any problems.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】[解析] 推理判断题。根据too... to...结构的意思可知，该句的本意是“太大而不至于失败”。但本题要求回答的是其在文章中的具体含义，这种表面理解肯定不正确，由此可知A“贷方太大而根本不可能失败”不符合题意，所以A不正确。该句前面的话明确指出，贷方知道纳税人不会坐视不管，即：纳税人会为此负责，而自己不需要对此负责，这也正是too big to fail的真正含义，由此可知，B“贷方不会为它们不谨慎的贷款而赔偿”，符合题意，所以B正确。C“贷方非常强大，能够支付任何贷款”，这本身内容太绝对，另外文章也未提及，所以C不正确。D“美国非常强大，可以解决任何问题”，文章没有提及，所以D也不正确。
单选题
In the third paragraph, the author mainly talks about
A. why companies take efforts to avoid identity theft.
B. the reason of companies' effortlessness to help avoid identity
theft.
C. the reason of taking time to solve the problem of identity theft.
D. the cause of companies offering on-the-spot loans.