题目内容
Tell an investment banker that a picture bought in 1950 for $30,000 sold this month for $104.1 million and you will be unlucky if you fail to get his attention. That was the case with the portrait of a young boy by Picasso when Sotheby’s dispersed on May 5 the tail end of the famous collection formed by the late John Hay Whitney and his wife Betsy Cushing Whitney. Sales added up to almost $190 million within two hours. If you then go on to explain that Whitney bought the 1905 portrait not for investment but for art’s sake, because he loved 19th- and 20th-century painting, you might well be greeted with a stare of compassionate irony. Yet that was exactly so. Had the heir to a vast fortune consulted experts at the time, most would have advised against the acquisition. Received wisdom in the 1950s had it that it was Picasso’s breakthrough in modern art that made him truly important, i. e. his early Cubist work. The Picasso case, which is probably the greatest success story ever in the art market, neatly illustrates the financial gamble that buying art represents. The biggest winners are not investors, but art lovers with a great eye who follow their intuition. The last 4th paragraph tells us that ______. A．art collectors are mostly astute professionals B．the public tend to simplify something not easily understood with a stereotype C．Picasso never changed his unique painting style D．the "Nu Accroupi" is Picasso’s best work
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The single most shattering statistic about life in America in the late 1990s was that tobacco killed more people than the combined total of those who died from AIDS, car accidents, alcohol, murder, suicide, illegal drugs and fire. The deaths of more than 400, 000 Americans each year, 160, 000 of them from lung cancer, make a strong case for the prohibition of tobacco, and particularly of cigarettes. The case, backed by solid evidence, has been made in every public arena since the early 1950s, when the first convincing link between smoking and cancer was established in clinical and epidemiological studies—yet 50 million Americans still go on smoking. tobacco-related illness. It is a remarkable story, clearly told, astonishingly well documented and with a transparent moral motif. Most smokers in America eventually manage to quit, and local laws banning smoking in public have become common, but the industry prospers. The tobacco companies have survived virtually everything their opponents have thrown at them. At the end of his story, Mr. Brandt writes: "The legal assault on Big Tobacco had been all but repelled. The industry was decidedly intact, ready to do business profitably at home and abroad. "Although the conclusion is not to his liking, Mr. Brandt’s is the first full and convincing explanation of how they pulled it off. Cigarettes overcame any lingering opposition to the pleasure they gave when American soldiers came to crave them during the World War I. War, says Mr. Brandt, was "a critical watershed in establishing the cigarette as a dominant product in modern consumer culture. " Cigarettes were sexy, and the companies poured money into advertising. By 1950 Americans smoked 350 billion cigarettes a year and the industry accounted for 3.5% of consumer spending on non-durables. The first 50 years of the"cigarette century"were a golden era for Big Tobacco. That was simply because, until the 1940s, not enough men had been smoking for long enough to develop fatal cancers (women did not reach this threshold until the 1970s). The first clinical and epidemiological studies linking eigarette-smoking and lung cancer were published only in 1950. By 1953 the six leading companies had agreed that a collective response was required. They paid handsomely for a public-relations campaign that insistently denied any proof of a causal connection between smoking and cancer. This worked well until 1964, when a devastating report from the surgeon-general’s advisory committee in effect ended medical uncertainty about the harmfulness of smoking. But Big Tobacco rode the punches. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruled that health warnings must appear on each pack, the industry, consented. But it shrewdly exploited the warning: "In a culture that emphasised individual responsibility, smokers would bear the blame for willful risk-taking," notes Mr. Brandt. Many cases for damages against the companies foundered on that rock. Cigarette-makers also marshaled their numerous allies in Congress to help the passage of a law that bypassed federal agencies such as the FTC, and made Congress itself solely responsible for tobacco regulation. Describing the pervasive influence of tobacco lobbyists, he says: "Legislation from Congress testified to the masterful preparation and strategic command of the tobacco industry. " However, the industry was powerless to prevent a flood of damaging internal documents, leaked by insiders. The companies were shown, for instance, to have cynically disregarded evidence from their in-house researchers about the addictive properties of nicotine. Internal papers also showed that extra nicotine was added to cigarettes to guarantee smokers sufficient" satisfaction". Despite such public-relations disasters, the industry continued to win judgments, most significantly when the Supreme Court rejected by five votes to four a potentially calamitous attack that would have given the Federal Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products. The industry’s shrewdest move was to defuse a barrage of eases brought by individual states, aiming to reclaim the cost of treating sick smokers. The states in 1998 accepted a settlement of $246 billion over 25 years (the price of a pack rose by 45 cents shortly afterwards). In return, the states agreed to end all claims against the companies. But the settlement tied the state governments to tobacco’s purse-strings; they now had an interest in the industry’s success. For those who thought the settlement was akin to" dancing with the devil", it appeared in retrospect that the devil had indeed had the best tunes, reports Mr. Brandt. To his credit, he manages to keep his historian’s hat squarely on his head. But you can feel the anguish. It can be inferred from the first two paragraphs that
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