Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved i

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问题 Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during the half century following the Civil War, with some of the most dramatic increases occurring in the domains of transportation, manufacturing, and trade and distribution. The development of the railroad and telegraph systems during the middle third of the nineteenth century led to significant improvements in the speed, volume, and regularity of shipments and communications, making possible a fundamental transformation in the production and distribution of goods.
In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the emergence of the grain elevators, the cotton presses, the warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so many of the nation’s farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy (阴谋,共谋) against them. In manufacturing, the transformation was marked by the emergence of jobber (批发商，做零工者), the wholesaler, and the mass retailer. And there appeared the new factory system which consisted of the changed organization and complexity of factories as well as the mass scale of the plants. These changes radically altered the nature of work during the half century between 1870 and 1920.
To be sure, there were still small workshops, where skilled craftspeople manufactured products ranging from newspapers to cabinets to plumbing fixtures (配件，设备). There were the sweatshops in city tenements (廉价公寓), where groups of men and women in household settings manufactured clothing and cigars on a piecework basis. And there were factories in occupa-tions such as metalwork where individual contractors presided over what were essentially handicraft proprietorships (所有权) that coexisted within a single building. But as the number of wage earners in manufacturing rose from 2. 7 million in 1880 to 4. 5 million in 1900 to 8. 4 million in 1920, the number of huge plants like the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia burgeoned, as did the size of the average plant. (The Baldwin Works had 600 employees in 1855, 3 000 in 1875, and 8 000 in 1900). By 1920, at least in the northeastern United States where most of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners were concentrated, three-quarters of those worked in factories with more than 100 employees and 30 percent worked in factories with more than 1 000 employees. [br] Which of the following statements about manufacturing before 1870 can be inferred from the passage?

选项 A、Most manufacturing activity was highly organized.
B、Most manufacturing occurred in relatively small plants.
C、The most commonly manufactured goods were cotton presses.
D、Manufacturing and agriculture each made up about half of the nation’s economy.

答案 B

解析本题是一道引申推断类问题。问下面哪个关于1870年前的制造业的说法是可以从文章中推断出来的。利用查阅式阅读法，我们可以从文章第二段中找到与答案相关的信息。这段指出，制造业的变化表现在出现了批发商、零售商和大规模的零售店。在新工厂制度下，工厂变得规模更大，结构更复杂，组织和管理也更系统化。尤其第三段也提供了与问题答案相关的内容。仍然还有小工厂生产各种商品。因此，本题的正确答案应是B“在1870年以前大多数制造业的工厂规模都比较小”。

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