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高口阅读选择题第四篇解析
Question 16-20
第四篇文章不论是结构上还是出题角度方面都与第一篇文章颇为类似。不同的是，这一篇文章内容比较简单，论述层次也比较清晰。本文选自《商业周刊》，全文778字。
The month of January offered those who track the ups and downs of the U.S. economy 92 significant data releases and announcements to digest. That's according to a calendar compiled by the investment bank UBS. The number doesn't include corporate earnings, data from abroad or informal indicators like, say, cardboard prices (a favorite of Alan Greenspan's back in the day).It was not always thus. "One reads with dismay of Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt designing policies to combat the Great Depression of the 1930s on the basis of such sketchy data as stock price indices, freight car loadings, and incomplete indices of industrial production," writes the University of North Carolina's Richard Froyen in his macroeconomics textbook.
首段仍然以例证入手，同样在结尾处出现考点，并需要将重点放在下文。本段讲述今天的经济危机与1930年大萧条时期的差异之一就是，人们创造出了更多的经济数据，并逐一加以分析。题中问道这个例子说明的道理是什么？答案就在例子结尾的下文。
But that was then. The Depression inspired the creation of new measures like gross domestic product. (It was gross national product back in those days, but the basic idea is the same.) Wartime planning needs and advances in statistical techniques led to another big round of data improvements in the 1940s. And in recent decades, private firms and associations aiming to serve the investment community have added lots of reports and indexes of their own. Taken as a whole, this profusion of data surely has increased our understanding of the economy and its ebb and flow. It doesn't seem to have made us any better at predicting the future, though; perhaps that would be too much to ask.
But what is troubling at a time like this, with the economy on everyone's mind, is how misleading many economic indicators can be about the present.
第二段开头用时间状语进行了对比： that was then… in recent decades…but what is troubling at a time like this…到这里，文章的铺垫部分才最终结束，主题清楚的展开：本文论述的是how misleading many economic indicators can be about the PRESENT.即经济指标对经济现状有多大的误导作用？在这里，作者明确指出，指标的确有误导性。
