《考研英语阅读理解100篇 高分版》 Unit 18 - TEXT THREE

It is a curious irony that Europe, which often takes a dim view of market forces, lets them rip in sport, while America, usually the world's most enthusiastic exponent of commerce and its consequences for society, has all sorts of arrangements in place to mitigate its effects on the nation's favourite pastimes. But these days, the American model is gaining adherents in Europe. Sports ministers in many countries are arguing that football needs to be exempted from competition law in order to allow governing bodies to equalise the resources of clubs without risking prosecution. The European Commission's strategy paper on sport, published on July 11th, ignored those calls; but the pressure will not go away.
Professional sport differs from other businesses in one important respect. Rival teams need each other to produce a sellable product: a match. In most businesses cooperation between rivals would attract the ire of antitrust authorities. But in sport, an element of collusion is unavoidable. The balance between collusion and individualism is a hard one to strike, but has been managed reasonably well by Europe's trustbusters. The collective selling of television rights, now the main source of income for football's elite, has usually been sanctioned by the European Commission's antitrust arm. Joint marketing is defensible, because sports contests are by their nature a collaboration.
Egalitarians quibble that the bulk of the money ends up with rich well-supported clubs. The English Premier League, for instance, collectively sells its television rights and splits the proceeds between clubs. But a club's share partly depends on how many of its games are broadcast and how high it finishes in the league, so Chelsea and Manchester United get a bigger slice. The worry is that the continued dominance of national championships by a few clubs will drive away supporters.
In the United States the baseball, basketball, hockey and American football leagues try to mitigate the effects of competition and inequality through revenue- and talent-sharing agreements, such as “the draft” (baseball even has a specific exemption from antitrust law). But it is not clear that this is either necessary or desirable. Measures to increase equality within a league take the edge off competition—and therefore, presumably, off the terror that drives sportsmen to excellence.
There is more to sport than watching too well-matched teams vie for supremacy. Professional basketball in America has lost some of its shine since one of Michael Jordan's many retirements ended the Chicago Bulls' dominance of the sport. The lesson from this and from golf's popularity since the emergence of Tiger Woods is that sporting prowess matters more to fans than strict competitive balance.
European football has never been a balanced affair. The very first professional league championship in 1889 was a cakewalk for Preston North End, which went through a 22-game season without losing a match (it won in 1890，too, though never since). Championships in Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands and Scotland are nearly always won by just two or three clubs. Leagues in bigger countries are scarcely less open. Manchester United has won nine out of 15 league titles since the English Premier League was set up in 1992. None of this has impeded the global popularity of football, which has done far better as an export industry than America's more equal sports.
1. The word “mitigate” (Line 3, Paragraph 1) most probably means _____.
[A] moderate
[B] enforce
[C] release
[D] mediate
2. In the field of sport, a change or tendency is taking place gradually in Europe that _____.
[A] the government begins to make use of market forces to influence sport
[B] the government intends to sanction relevant football laws so that all clubs can share resources equally
[C] the factors of both cooperation and collision are getting better managed in the sport field
[D] it becomes widely expected that sport could be independent of the market forces
3. Professional sport differs from other businesses in the following aspects except _____.
[A] it is exempted from the influence of antitrust authorities
[B] collusion in sport is not counted as a kind of trust
[C] joint marketing could defend sport from being influenced by antitrust laws
[D] the European Commission supports the coalition in sport
4. Towards the pursuit for the equality within a league, the author's attitude is that _____.
[A] Europe should not be too eager to take more measures for the sake of increasing equality within a league
[B] it is unnecessary to mitigate the effects of competition and inequality
[C] it is somewhat intricate whether this is necessary or desirable to seek competitive balance
[D] too much stress on the equality within a league will reduce the sport prowess
5. From the cases described in the last paragraph, it can be inferred that _____.
[A] European football is characterized by all sorts of inequalities
[B] it is indeed of little value to maintain absolute competitive balance within a league
[C] the charm of sport itself is more important than competitive balance within a league
[D] there is no need for Europe to imitate the American model since the latter is commercially unsuccessful in practice