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  3. This week, many Americans will be buying into the same dream: winning the unprecedentedly large $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot o

This week, many Americans will be buying into the same dream: winning the unprecedentedly large $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot o

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问题     This week, many Americans will be buying into the same dream: winning the unprecedentedly large $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot on Wednesday night. Since last week, when the jackpot had accrued to over $500 million, Powerball tickets have been reportedly flying off bodega and convenience-store counters. The odds of winning remain 1 in 292 million—that’s why the lottery is sometimes called a "stupidity tax" — but a ticket’s $2 price tag does make it a low-risk impulse buy. (Alex Tabarrok, over at Marginal Revolution, suggests that those who participate should buy tickets early in order to enjoy their real value—the pleasure of anticipation—for longer).
    A reader complains: "The lottery is a scheme acted on the poorest and most gullible." Many people are hoping to acquire this tremendous windfall, but is what they’re after something that will actually make them happy? Anecdotes about how winning the lottery can be bad luck abound—a winning ticket has led some "lucky" winners into bankruptcy, or worse. But there’s also the possibility that all of the lottery winners who are living comfortably don’t make headlines.
    Researchers have tried to figure out which of these narratives is more accurate by looking into two questions whose answers lottery players assume to be in the affirmative; Does winning the lottery make people rich in the long run? And does an influx of tons of cash make people happier? Their results, though, suggests that these answers aren’t so straightforward.
    In the late 1970s and ’80s, the sociologist H. Roy Kaplan performed now-classic research on what became of lottery winners. His most famous study asked lottery winners how happy they had been before and after their big checks arrived. That 1978 study, which had a very small sample size, famously found that lottery winners were not that much happier than the control group—a bunch of people who didn’t win the lottery—after their win. (A 2008 Dutch study concluded the same thing.) Kaplan did a bigger study in 1987 on 576 lottery winners, and found that "popular myths and stereotypes about winners were inaccurate"—by which he meant that American lottery winners did not typically quit their jobs and spend lavishly.
    In the end, while winning can turn out bad, the real bad thing is probably the lottery itself; America, especially its poor households, spends way too much on it, and the odds are worse than at a casino.
We learn from Paragraph 2 that
选项 A、buying lottery is a permanent source for gossip.
B、lucky winners deserve our greater admiration.
C、some stories about winners may not be reliable.
D、poor families cannot escape the trap of lottery.
答案C
解析 (1)根据题干关键词定位至第2段。(2)第2段介绍了针对彩票的各种说法，之后作者给出了评论。(3)根据文章，“有些人提出了批评意见”(第2段：complains)，“许多人想发横财”(第2段：windfall)，“关于中奖者存在各种轶事”(第2段：anecdotes)，“还有些中奖者可能没有被关注”(第2段：possibility)。结论便是“对于中奖者人们持有各种说法(stories)”。(4)那么，作者在第3段便给出了对这些stories的评价，即“哪种说法更为准确呢?”(第3段：accurate)，然而研究却发现，“答案并非那么简单”(第3段：straightforward)。据此，确定选项[C]是最佳答案。
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