GMAT考试

【单选题】The questions in this group are based on the content of a passage.After reading the passage, choose the best answer to each question.Answer all questions following the passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.
Congressman Hastings has proposed thatCongress should abolish theElectoralCollege system for electing the president and replace it with a system of direct popular election. TheElectoralCollege system is flawed, he argues, because it runs directly counter to the democratic principle that every citizen’s vote should count equally.
Because of the winner-take-all system in which the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes, the citizens who voted for the losing candidate are effectively disenfranchised from the national election, even if their candidate lost the state by only a handful of votes. Moreover, because each state’s number of electors is the same as its number of members ofCongress, the citizens of small states get a disproportionately larger vote than citizens of more populous states. In the 1988 election, for example, the combined voting-age population of the six least populous states--Alaska,Delaware, NorthDakota, SouthDakota, Vermont, and Wyoming--was 3,119,000. These six states held 21 electoral votes among them. Florida, with a voting-age population of 9,614,000, also had 21 electoral votes.Because of inequities of this nature, there have been four presidential elections in which the candidate who won theElectoralCollege actually lost the popular vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.
Congressman Markham has argued that Hastings’s proposed changes are unnecessary and even dangerous. First of all, he argues, theElectoralCollege system, whatever its flaws, has resulted in a stable democratic government for more than 200 years, which shows that it is doing something right. Second, the winner-take-all system helps create decisive majorities in theElectoralCollege, thereby reducing the problem of disputed elections that we might see in the event of direct popular elections. Third, the current system of allocating electors helps protect the interests of small states, which would be largely neglected in favor of large states if theElectoralCollege were based entirely on population. Protecting these states’ rights is essential to upholding the principle of federalism (in which the states and the federal government maintain distinct powers).
When theElectoralCollege system was first formalized by the TwelfthAmendment in 1804, a direct popular vote would have been impossible to implement, and theElectoralCollege was probably the best way to approximate the will of the people.Advances in technology and communication, however, now mean that a direct popular vote would be as simple, if not simpler, to administer than the currentElectoralCollege system.Alternative ways to reform the system would be to do away with the winner-take-all system of state electors, to base the numbers of electors strictly on state populations, or to have a direct popular election but to weight the votes from different states differently in order to preserve the influence of small states.
The passage is primarily concerned with which of the following
A、Evaluating the merits of theElectoralCollege system as a means of protecting federalism
B、Examining the impact of the TwelfthAmendment on the history of theAmerican presidency
C、Disputing the validity of theAmerican democratic process
D、Presenting arguments regarding the best way to elect the president of the United States
E、Comparing arguments regarding the nature of democratic processes
网考网参考答案：D
网考网解析：
The passage is entirely concerned with presenting arguments for and against the Electoral College and other systems of electing the American president, so D is the best answer. Answers A and B are too limited in their scope, E is too general, and C is both too general and mostly off topic, since neither of the congressmen suggests that the democratic process is "invalid. document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>