2. 职称英语
  3. You know her—that nice teenager across the street? Chloe. There she is, sitt

You know her—that nice teenager across the street? Chloe. There she is, sitt

游客2023-12-21  69
问题     You know her—that nice teenager across the street? Chloe. There she is, sitting in one of the two captain’s seats in the midsection of her mom’s Toyota Sienna, bopping along to the music on her iPod. Now and then she pulls out one of the ear buds so that she can tell her mom some forgotten bit of news or gossip; Chloe’s mom is up to speed on the dramas that are always unfolding in her daughter’s circle of friends, just as she can tell you the date of her next French test, the topic of her coming history paper and the location and scope of her next community service project. They have a great night planned out: they’re going to pick up Chloe’s best friend and then drive back home for a night of DVDs and popcorn in the family room. Her mom will putter around close by, and her dad will probably sit down and watch one of the movies with the girls.
    When I was in high school in the 1970s, we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers. If an otherwise normal girl thought that the best way to spend a Saturday night was home with her parents—not just co-existing with them, but actually hanging out with them—we would have been looking for a bucket of pig’s blood.
    In my day, we did whatever was necessary to get out on a Saturday night: we climbed out of windows; we jumped on the back of motorcycles; God help us, we hitchhiked. We needed, on the most basic and physical level, to be out in the dangerous night, with one another, away from our parents and the safety of home. It was no way to live, and some of us didn’t. But it was a drive so elemental and essential that there seemed no way to deny it.
    That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third.
    The reasons have a great deal to do with the cost of car insurance and driver’s education programs. But among middle-and upper-middle-class young adults, the peer power that created the teenage car culture, the compelling energy that once served to blast an adolescent away from his or her parents has begun to drain away. Teenagers report that they don’t need to drive; their parents are willing to take them where they want to go, and they are content to ride shotgun with Mom, texting and yakking all the way to the mall.
    I had not taught high school long before I attended my first funeral: an 18-year-old, loud in the halls one day, dead on the side of the road the next. If you want to improve your daughter’s chances of surviving her teens, don’t give her the car keys. If our generation of parents has done one thing right, it has been to manipulate our children into giving up driving.
    How have we managed it? Through the very aspect of family life we complain about the most: the extracurricular activities that we pay for and arrange and attend; the risibly involved homework assignments that we are so enmeshed with; the whole annoying side industry of being a "servant" and a "private driver".
    These things harass us no end. But they have bound our children to us in complex and powerful ways, and this has been, to some extent, the point of the entire exercise. It means that we can prolong the period of our children’s dependency, to extend the sweet phase of cocooning and protecting well into their adolescence.
    An American teenager is part premature and part invalid, able to excel in obscure sports but needing his mother to rush the field with a jacket and thermos of soup when he’s finished. They have been hobbled by our endless meddling; they lack resourcefulness and resilience. They’re like little children, soft and easily wounded.
    But for all their fussiness and neediness, they love us; they want to be close to us. They have every reason to believe that we will take care of them, even when they would be better off if we let them struggle a bit.
    Learn to drive? Why would they want to do that?
选项 A、a teacher.
B、a parent.
C、a teenager.
D、a reporter.
答案 B
解析 本题是推断题。虽然从第六段可以看小，作者是一位中学老师，但是这篇文章的主题讲的是减少青少年子女开车的方法问题，所以应该是从家长的角度出发，故[B]为答案，排除[A]。此外，第六段指出如今的父母成功地抑制了孩子们开车，而第七段马上提问“How have we managed it?”(我们是如何做到的呢?)明显是从家长的角度提问。第八段也提到了“our children”，更说明了这一点。[C]和[D]都与这些细节不符，故排除。
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