单选题
In 1880, Sir Joshua Waddilore, a Victorian philanthropist,
founded Provident Financial to provide affordable loans to working-class
families in and around Bradford, in northern England. This month his company,
now one of Britain's leading providers of "home credit" — small, short-term,
unsecured loans — began the nationwide rollout of Vanquis, a credit card aimed
at people that mainstream lenders shun. The card offers up to ￡200 ($380) of
credit, at a price: for the riskiest customers, the annual interest rate will be
69%. Provident says that the typical interest rate is closer to
50% and that it charges no fees for late payments or breaching credit limits.
Still, that is triple the rate on regular credit cards and far above the 30%
charged by store cards. And the Vanquis card is being launched just when
Britain's politicians and media are full of worry about soaring consumer debt.
Last month, a man took his own life after running up debts of ￡130,000 on 22
different credit cards. Credit cards for "sub-prime" borrowers,
as the industry delicately calls those with poor credit records, are new in
Britain but have been common in America for a while. Lenders began issuing them
when the prime market became saturated, prompting them to look for new sources
of profit. Even in America, the sub-prime market has plenty of room for growth.
David Robertson of the Nilson Report, a trade magazine, reckons that
outstanding sub-prime credit-card debt accounts for only 3% of the $597 billion
that Americans owe on plastic. The sub- prime sector grew by 7.9% last year,
compared with only 2.6% for the industry as a whole. You might
wonder, though, how companies can make money from lending to customers they know
to be bad risks — or at any rate, how they can do it legitimately. Whereas
delinquencies in the credit-card industry as a whole are around 4%-5%, those in
the sub- prime market are almost twice as high, and can reach 15% in hard
times. Obviously, issuers charge higher interest rates to
compensate them for the higher risk of not being repaid. And all across the
credit-card industry, the assessment and pricing of risks has been getting more
and more refined, thanks largely to advances in technology and data processing.
Companies also use sophisticated computer programs to track slower payment or
other signs of increased risk. Sub-prime issuers pay as much attention to
collecting debt as to managing risk; they impose extra charges, such as
application fees; and they cap their potential losses by lending only small
amounts ($500 is a typical credit limit). All this is easier to
describe than to do, especially when the economy slows. After the bursting of
the technology bubble in 2000, several sub-prime credit-card providers failed.
Now there are only around 100, of which nine issue credit cards. Survivors such
as Metris and Providian, two of the bigger sub-prime card companies, have become
choosier about their customers' credit histories. As the
economy recovered, so did lenders' fortunes. Fitch, a rating agency, says that
the proportion of sub-prime credit-card borrowers who are more than 60 days in
arrears (a good predictor of eventual default) is the lowest since November
2001. But with American interest rates rising again, some worry about another
squeeze. As Fitch's Michael Dean points out, sub-prime borrowers tend to have
not just higher-rate credit cards, but dearer auto loans and variable-rate
mortgages as well. That makes a risky business even riskier.
单选题
Sir Joshua Waddiove is mentioned in the first paragraph to
A. illustrate the history of credit card companies.
B. introduce the issuing of a new credit card.
C. show how working class families get affordable loans.
D. build up consumers' trust in Provident Financial.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】[解析] 推理判断题。作者在第一段第一句介绍Sir Joshua Waddilore是为引出主题服务的，为主题作铺垫。通读全文可知，文章的小心是讲述了一种新信用卡，故B为答案，同时排除A。C是利用首段首句中的“affordable loans to working-class families”设置干扰。D本文并未涉及到。
单选题
Vanquis is different from regular cards in that