2. 职称英语
  3. In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in theaccidental death of their two

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in theaccidental death of their two

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问题 In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the
accidental death of their two year old was told that since
the child had made no real economic contribution to the
family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast,
(5) less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three
year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages
and won an award of $750,000.
The transformation in social values implicit in juxta-
posing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana
(10) Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child.
During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept
of the “useful” child who contributed to the family
economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion
of the “useless” child who, though producing no income
(15) for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet
considered emotionally “priceless.” Well established
among segments of the middle and upper classes by the
mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread through-
out society in the iate-nineteenth and early-twentieth
(20) centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations
and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the
assumption that a child’s emotional value made child
labor taboo.
For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were
(25) many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s
productive value in a maturing industrial economy,
the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child
mortality, and the development of the companionate
family (a family in which members were united by
(30) explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors
critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth.
Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus,’...
although clearly shaped by profound changes in the
economic, occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer
(35) maintains. “was also part of a cultural process ‘of sacral-
ization’ of children’s lives. ” Protecting children from the
crass business world became enormously important for
late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she
suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what
(40) they perceived as the relentless corruption of human
values by the marketplace.
In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s
worth. Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new
“sociological economics,” who have analyzed such tradi-
(45) tionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, educa-
tion, and health solely in terms of their economic deter-
minants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces
in the form of individual “preferences,” these sociologists
tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by
(50) the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is
highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead
the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to
transform price. As children became more valuable in
emotional terms, she argues, their “exchange” or “ sur-
(55) render” value on the market, that is, the conversion of
their intangible worth into cash terms, became much
greater.
选项 A、earnings of the person at time of death
B、wealth of the party causing the death
C、degree of culpability of the party causing the death
D、amount of money that had been spent on the person killed
E、amount of suffering endured by the family of the person killed
答案 A
解析 A is the best answer. In the first paragraph, the author cites an accidental-death case from nineteenth-century America in which the absence of economic contribution on the part of a deceased child was ruled sufficient grounds to deny the awarding of damages to the child’s parents. The author goes on to discuss how this case typified attitudes that persisted even into the twentieth century. It can be inferred from this that in nineteenth-century America the chief consideration in determining damages in an accidental-death case was the deceased person’s earnings. There are no evidence in the passage to suggest that the factors in B, C, D and E were of primary concern in determining accidental-death damages in nineteenth-century America.
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