单选题 Banking is about money; and no other familiar services or commodities arouse such excesses of passion and dislike. Nor is there any other about which more nonsense is talked. The type of thing that comes to mind is not what normally called economics, which is inexact rather than nonsensical, and only in the same way as all scientists are at the point where they try to predict people's behavior and its consequences. Indeed most social sciences and, for example, medicine could probably be described in the same way.
However, it is common to hear assertions of the kind 'if you were marooned (孤立无援) on a desert island a few seed potatoes would be more useful to you than a million pounds' as though this proved something important about money except the undeniable fact that it would not be much used to anyone in a situation where very few of us are at all likely to find ourselves. Money in fact is a token, or symbolic object, exchangeable on demand by its holders for goods and services. Its use for this purpose is universal except within a small number of primitive agricultural communities.
Money and the price mechanism, i.e., the changes in prices expressed in money terms of different goods and services, are the means by which all modern societies regulate demand and supply for these things. Especially important are the relative changes in price of different goods and services compared with each other. To take random examples: the price of house building has over the past five years risen a good deal faster than that of domestic appliances like refrigerators, but slower than that of motor insurance or French Impressionist paintings. This fact has complex implications for students of the brick industry, trade unionism, town planning, insurance companies, fine art auctions, and politics. Unpacking these implications is what economics is about, but their implications for bankers are quite different.
In general, in modern industrialized societies, prices of services or goods produced in a context requiring a high service-content (e.g., a meal in a restaurant) are likely to rise in price more rapidly than goods capable of mass-production on a large scale. It is also a characteristic of highly developed economies that the number of workers employed in service industries tends to rise and that of workers employed in manufacturing to fall. The discomfort this truth causes the big general trade unions as they contrast their own situation with that of the rapidly growing white-collar unions has been an important source of tension in western political life for many years and is likely to remain so for many more.

单选题 According to the author, banking ______.

单选题 As a token in modern societies, money ______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】根据题干信息词token定位到第二段最后两句。根据该处可知，“金钱是种象征或象征性事物，可使其持有者交换所需的商品和服务。除了在少数原始的农业社区中，金钱的这种用途是很普遍的”。由此可见，金钱是持有者交换商品或服务时的媒介，故D项为正确答案。虽然金钱在少数原始农业社区中不被使用，但这并不意味着它被排除在所有非工业社会之外，故B项被排除。其他两项本文未提及。

单选题 Under the support of money and price mechanism, people can ______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】根据题干信息词money and price mechanism定位到第三段第一句。根据该句可知，“金钱和价格机制，即不同商品和服务用金钱作为标准所显示出的价格变化，是所有现代社会调节这些东西的供求关系的方式”。由此可知，金钱和价格机制作用于供求关系，故C项为正确答案。而A项中的the supply of goods和the demand of services不对应，且概括不够全面，故排除。B、D两项均不符合文意。