填空题 {{B}}Directions:{{/B}}
For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A-G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraph A and D have been correctly placed. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.
A. Is America's mortgage market rigged against blacks? Yes, say many researchers and lobbyists. Blacks are rejected for home loans far more often than whites; and despite four years of tough enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, they are likelier to be turned down than when Bill Clinton took office. No, retort mortgage lenders. Relative rejection rates reflect not race, but such things as credit and debt histories. And anyway, black home-ownership and lending to black borrowers have both increased sharply in the past few years.
B. Follow-up work by researchers at the Chicago Fed found that the loan officers in the Aston study— almost all of them white—treated objective information differently according to the race of the applicant. In particular, bad edit histories and indebtedness cut blacks' chances of approval far more than those of whites. However, this research has com under attack. Suppose, say its critics, that blacks were being widely discriminated against. Then blacks who succeed in getting mortgages should be less likely to default than whites. But a study by four economists at the Federal Reserve found that black default rates are higher. Mom, black— owned banks tend to have even higher rejection rates, suggesting factors other than race are at work.
C. Increasingly, lenders gather information about applicants over the phone, by post or via a computer, rather than face—to—face. Remote assessment is much favored by mortgage brokers, who accounted for 56% of the loan market. Because it is easier to bundle together loans with few quarks, they favor hassle—free applicator. And because they like to deal with large amounts of money, many prefer not to bother with low—value mortgages. The rise of these lenders has made it more likely that poorer Americans black or white, will be left out.
D. The virtue of remote mortgage assessment and credit bong is that it is impossible to be racist when the applicant is invisible. But the irony is that because blacks are on average poorer than most Americans, they are more likely to be economically insecure and to have dodger credit histories. Thus these color-blind devise will not increase black's access to mortgage finance may do the reverse.
E. The Clinton administration has not joined the search war, but it clearly smells racism in the lending process. And rather than pursue individual instances of discrimination, it is bong lenders toward the use of technocratic tools that are color-blind but unforgiving to Americans with low incomes. Ironically, these even fairer tools may help to exposing why all racial categories, and especially blacks, are suffering increasing denial rates.
F. Both sides agree that good candidates, of whatever color, will get mortgages, whereas bad ones will not, and that explicit, Jbo-Crow-style racism is gone. They disagree about the treatment of applicants whose economic histories are flawed but not hopeless. Among this group, according to a paper by economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, published last year and much discussed since, whites do get a better deal. The authors estimated the effect of 38 variables, such as income and location of property, on the chances of getting a loan. Had blacks been treated in the same way as whites, they concluded, 21% would have been rejected: in fact, 28% were.
G. Another tool, credit scores, measure the risk of delinquency and default. Scores are calculated by compiling information on applicants' credit histories. Those with less than a given score are turned down. Sinner Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac, another government—backed provider of secondary mortgages, last year asked lenders to provide credit scores, and their use has soared.
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