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  3. American Youth Issues For years now, we’ve heard the

American Youth Issues For years now, we’ve heard the

游客2023-12-26  11
问题                         American Youth Issues
   For years now, we’ve heard the gripes by and about millennials. Their plight seems so very 21st century: the unstable careers, the confusion of technologies, the delayed romance, parenthood and maturity.
   Many of the same concerns and challenges faced the children of the industrial revolution, as the booms and busts of America’s wild 19th century tore apart the accepted order. These Americans were born into an earthquake. During the 1800s America’s population exploded from 5 million to 75 million. The nation went from a rural backwater to an industrial behemoth — producing more than Britain, Germany and France combined — but every decade the economy crashed.
   For rootless 20-somethings, each national shock felt intimate, rattling their love lives and careers. Many young adults could not accept that their personal struggles were just ripples of a large-scale social dislocation. So each New Year’s, they blamed themselves.
   Romance worried them above all. Today some fret about the changing institution of marriage, but we are used to such adjustments; 19th-century Americans were blind-sided when the average age of marriage rose precipitously to 26 — a level America didn’t return to until 1990. In a world where life expectancy hovered below age 50, delaying marriage until 26 was revolutionary.
   While some looked for love, others looked for jobs. Before the modern era, young people found work within family networks, laboring at home or on a farm. The industrial economy changed that.
   The good news was that there were more jobs; the bad news was that they were isolating and temporary. Work now meant small factories or lumber camps or railroad crews of strangers. For young people this meant chronic instability. A young man might brag about his new job one week and find himself begging for money from his father the next.
   While 19th-century young adults faced many of the anxieties that trouble 23-year-olds today, they found novel solutions. The first was to move. Young men and women were notoriously transient, heading out on "wander years" when life at home seemed stalled.    Another solution was to find like-minded young adults to share their baffling discouragements and buoyant hopes. Nineteenth-century young people were compulsive joiners. Political movements, literary societies, religious organizations, dancing clubs and even gangs proliferated. The men and women who joined cared about the stated cause, but also craved the community these groups created. They realized that while instability was inevitable, isolation was voluntary.
   Today’s young adults are constantly rebuked for not following the life cycle popular in 1960. But a quick look at earlier eras shows just how unusual mid-20th-century young people were. A society in which people married out of high school and held the same job for 50 years is the historical outlier.
   Americans considered young adulthood the most dangerous part of life, and struggled to find a path to maturity. Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition. Young adults might do the same today. Stop worrying about how they appear from the skewed perspective of the mid-20 th century and find a new home, a new stability and a new community in the new year. [br] Which of the following is NOT true about American youth of the 19th century?
选项 A、An earthquake hit America when they were born.
B、They lived in an era when America transformed from an agrarian rural society to an industrial urban one.
C、They witnessed historical changes within society structures.
D、Their average life span was less than 50 years.
答案 A
解析 是非排除题型，答案是A。本题涉及文章关于19世纪美国年轻人的描述，需综合把握第二、三、四段信息。根据第二段最后一句“The nation went from a rural backwater to an industrial behemoth”可知，B选项正确；根据第三段national shock、a large-scale social dislocation等词可知，C选项正确；根据第四段“a world where life expectancy hovered below age 50”可知，D选项正确；A选项是对原文的错误理解。原句“These Americans were born into an earthquake”是一种比喻性表达，指这代人一出生就赶上了大动荡，而非如字面所指遭遇地震。本题核心：仔细辨析原文词句使用的是字面意义还是比喻义，辨析方法有二：一是上下文；二是句法结构。比喻义的使用往往能从句法结构的特殊性上窥见一些端倪，如介词的使用，假如要表达“生于地震中”这一概念，一般使用介词during，而此处使用的介词为into，应考虑存在另有所指的可能性。
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