經(jīng)典長(zhǎng)難句分析

　　1. The American economic system is, organized around a basically private-enterprise, market- oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most.

　　2. Thus, in the American economic system it is the demand of individual consumers, coupled with the desire of businessmen to maximize profits and the desire of individuals to maximize their incomes, that together determine what shall be produced and how resources are used to produce it.

　　3. If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in turn will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product.

　　4. In the American economy, the concept of private property embraces not only the ownership of productive resources but also certain rights, including the right to determine the price of a product or to make a free contract with another private individual.

　　5.Numerous other commercial enterprises, from theaters to magazine publishers, from gas and electric utilities to milk processors, bring better and more efficient services to consumers through the use of computers.

　　6.Expertise can be shared world wide through teleconferencing, and problems in dispute can be settled without the participants leaving their homes and/or jobs to travel to a distant conference site.

　　7.The Corporation will survive as a publicly funded broadcasting organization, at least for the time being, but its role, its size and its programs are now the subject of a nation wide debate in Britain.

　　8.After six months of arguing and final 16 hours of hot parliamentary debates, Australia"s Northern Territory became the first legal authority in the world to allow doctors to take the lives of incurably ill patients who wish to die.

　　9. Much of the language used to describe monetary policy, such as "steering the economy to a soft landing" of "a touch on the brakes" , makes it sound like a precise science. Nothing could be further from the truth.

　　10. Economists have been particularly surprised by favorable inflation figures in Britain and the United States, since, conventional measures suggest that both economies, and especially America"s, have little productive slack.

　　11. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight--issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones.

　　12. "The test of any democratic society, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column", "lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought and expression the widest possible latitude, however disputable or irritating the results may sometimes be..."

　　13. The Aswan Dam, for example, stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left-all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity.

　　14. Rather, we have a certain conception of the American citizen, a character who is incomplete if he cannot competently access how his livelihood and happiness are affected by things outside of himself.

　　15. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be highly regarded by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least a-mong them.