One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the advertisers. Its shrilling clamor dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screens and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the road-side billboards all day and flashes messages to us in colored lights at night. It has forced on us a whole new conception of the successful man as a man no less than 20% of whose mail consists of announcements of giant carpet sales.
Advertising has been among England’s biggest growing industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrate achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure
Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer-appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they finished it, by pretending that it gives status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover (养尊处优).
Other manufacturers find advertising saves them from changing their product. And manufacturers hate changes. The ideal product is one or another, some alteration seems called for--how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch (促销宣传) made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.
According to the passage modern advertising is "authoritative" because of the way it
A．influences our image of the kind of person we ought to be like.
B．interferes with the privacy of home life.
C．continually forces us into buying things.
D．distracts us no matter where we travel.
参考答案：A
解析：本题是一道推断题，要求考生判断第一段中各条信息间的因果关系。本段中有一系列形象描写来比喻广告无处不见、无时不闻，但这些都不是广告何以对我们的生活有 如此大的左右力的原因。广告的宣传为什么这么具有权威性 根据这一段的最后一句话，广告已经使得我们接受了一个全新的理念：成功人士的标志就是他收到的邮件中有20% 是广告，也就是说，人们之所以会听从广告的宣传，就是因为他们相信，跟着广告走就能心想事成，故选A。其余的选项与关键词“authoritative”不构成因果关系。