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  3. The best things in life are free, and that includes air and water. Swimming

The best things in life are free, and that includes air and water. Swimming

游客2025-03-27  9
问题     The best things in life are free, and that includes air and water. Swimming and breathing usually don’t cost anything, but neither does throwing away garbage. Since dumping pollution into the environment costs nothing, everybody does it, even though he may wish that he and everyone else would stop doing it. Clean air and water have not been recognized by the market as limited resources that can only absorb so much junk before they start spitting it back—exactly what had started happening by the early 1960s. The solution is to put a price on the use of these limited resources and stop classifying them as "free". Protection of air and water have to be brought into the market system. Very early on, then, the problem was properly diagnosed.
    But that was exactly the problem. The dilemma we faced was just that: how do you put a price on clean air—or at least on the act of fouling it while disposing of society’s wastes? Yet in there reluctance to perceive their concern as one of mere economics, environmentalists rejected this approach. It failed to match the religiosity of their cause. Instead, they supported a highly centralized, bureaucratic system based on difficult goals, detailed regulatory prescriptions, and awe-inspiring penalties for noncompliance.
    The way the Clean Air Act of 1970 affected industry has more or less passed into legend. It is not that it did not produce results. Air pollution has declined in many areas, and has increased in only a few. The real question is the costs that were incurred in the process.
    The major problem with the Clear Air Act is that it lays the burden of costs only on the people who make the effort to clean up. (The large fines were intended mainly as a threat, and are rarely imposed.) No one has yet put a price on using clean air as a dumping ground. The only standards for deciding who cleans up and who doesn’t are the necessarily arbitrary decisions arrived at by the state environmental agencies. Each industry, therefore, has every incentive to spend years in litigation trying to prove that it is someone else’s pollution that is at fault. [br] The word "reluctance" could best be replaced by ______.
选项 A、unwillingness
B、ignorance
C、imagination
D、effort
答案 A
解析 从文章中第二段不难推测reluctance应是“不愿意”的意思，选项中只有A项与它接近。
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