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  3. The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place

The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place

游客2024-04-18  29
问题     The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.
    Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50% , and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25% . Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.
    Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer ( with two professional incomes) and more stable: they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls "Goodnight Moon" time (after a popular book for infants).
    Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time: in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.
    Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th-grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as likely to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores.
    Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential, such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution. [br] Which of the following statements is true according to Putnam’s new book?
选项 A、Marital birth rate almost keeps unchanged among college graduates.
B、Non-marital births have been decreasing among high-school graduates.
C、African-Americans have given birth to more non-marital children.
D、More high-school-educated whites have children before marriage.
答案 A
解析 事实细节题。第二段第三句提到，在受过教育的精英之中，传统家庭正在蓬勃兴旺：受过高等教育的女子中只有不到10％生育非婚生孩子，这个数字与20世纪70年代几乎不分伯仲，换言之，在受过高等教育的女性中，婚内生子的比例在1970年到2007年间几乎没有变化，故答案为A)。B)“在高中毕业群体中，非婚生子女一直在减少”，文章只是在第二段第六句中提到高中教育程度的白人生育非婚生子女的情况增加了，故排除；C)“非裔美国人非婚生子女更多”，作者主要从不同教育阶层比较非婚生子女的比例，并没有整体比较白人和非裔美国人的非婚生子女的情况，故排除；D)“更多高中教育程度的白人在婚前生子”，作者在本段第六句提到高中教育程度的白人非婚生子女率有所提高，这与婚前生子概念不同，因此D)与原文意思不符，故排除。
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