[单项选择]

The Great Depression

Economists agree that the Wall Street crash of October 1929 heralded the Great Depression and by its dramatic effects on business, banking, and consumer confidence played a major role in worsening it. But many others agree that the crash was not the real cause of the economic turmoil. The severity of the Great Depression can be traced, at least on the American domestic front, to the impressive strength of the investment boom of the 1920s and to the vastly increased productivity of the agricultural sector in the aftermath of World War Ⅰ.
In the late 1920s there was a rapid rise in capital investment in the United States--both in productive industry and in the form of house building. The output of capital goods, that is, machinery and equipment used in the production process, rose by nearly a quarter between 1927 and 1929, and a great house-building explosion which had begun in 192
A. difficult
B. rigorous
C. complex
D. severe

[单项选择]
Economists agree that the Wall Street crash of October 1929 heralded the Great Depression and by its dramatic effects on business, banking, and consumer confidence played a major role in worsening it. But many others agree that the crash was not the real cause of the economic turmoil. The severity of the Great Depression can be traced, at least on the American domestic front, to the impressive strength of the investment boom of the 1920s and to the vastly increased productivity of the agricultural sector in the aftermath of World War Ⅰ.
In the late 1920s there was a rapid rise in capital investment in the United States--both in productive industry and in the form of house building. The output of capital goods, that is, machinery and equipment used in the production process, rose by nearly a quarter between 1927 and 1929, and a great house-building explosion which had begun in 192
A. consumers
B. businesses
C. bankers
D. economists

[单项选择]Mainstream pro-market economists all agree that competition is an （） spur to efficiency and innovation.
A. extravagant
B. exquisite
C. intermittent
D. indispensable

[单项选择]Since the Great Depression, the United States government has protected farmers from damaging drops in grain prices.
A. slight
B. surprising
C. sudden
D. harmful

[单项选择]Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated by the monetary, authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. Mr. Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure.
Most scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. But Mr. Phelps won his laurels in part tar kicking the feet from under his intellectual forerunners. In 1958 William Phillips, of the London School of Economics, showed that for much of the previous hundred years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. Economists were too quick to conclude that policy makers therefore faced a grand, macroeconomic trade-off, embodied in the so-called "Phillips curve". They could settle for unemployme
A. unemployment is a hot potato for economists to study.
B. unemployment is the topic that interests Mr. Phelps the most.
C. Mr. Phelps’s parents asked him to study unemployment.
D. Mr. Phelps’s research is based on the existing research results.