2. 职称英语
  3. According to anthropologists, people in pre-industrial societies spent 3 to

According to anthropologists, people in pre-industrial societies spent 3 to

游客2023-12-25  20
问题     According to anthropologists, people in pre-industrial societies spent 3 to 4 hours per day or about 20 hours per week doing the work necessary for life. Modern comparisons of the amount of work performed per week, however, begin with the Industrial Revolution (1760—1840) when 10- to 12-hour workdays with six workdays per week were the norm. Even with extensive time devoted to work, however, both incomes and standards of living were low. As incomes rose near the end of the Industrial Revolution, it became increasingly common to treat Saturday afternoons as a half-day holiday. The half holiday had become standard practice in Britain by the 1870’s, but did not become common in the United States until the 1920’s.
    In the United States, the first third of the twentieth century saw the workweek move from 60 hours per week to just under 50 hours by the start of the 1930’s. In 1914 Henry Ford reduced daily work hours at his automobile plants from 9 to 8.In 1926 he announced that henceforth his factories would close for the entire day on Saturday. At the time, Ford received criticism from other firms such as United States Steel and Westinghouse, but the idea was popular with workers.
    The Depression years of the 1930’s brought with them the notion of job sharing to spread available work around; the workweek dropped to a modem low for the United States of 35 hours. In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act mandated a weekly maximum of 40 hours to begin in 1940, and since that time the 8-hour day, 5-day workweek has been the standard in the United States.
    Adjustments in various places, however, show that this standard is not immutable. In 1987, for example, German metalworkers struck for and received a 37.5-hour workweek; and in 1990 many workers in Britain won a 37-hour week. Since 1989, the Japanese government has moved from a 6- to a 5-day workweek and has set a national target of 1, 800 work hours per year for the average worker. The average amount of work per year in Japan in 1989 was 2,088 hours per worker, compared to 1, 957 for the United States and 1,646 for France. [br] What does the passage mainly discuss?
选项 A、The reasons why people in pre-industrial societies worked few hours per week.
B、Changes that have occurred in the number of hours that people work per week.
C、A comparison of the number of hours worked per year in several industries.
D、Working conditions during the Industrial Revolution.
答案 B
解析 本题为主旨大意题，通读全文可知，本文主要讲述周工作时长的演变——第1段主要讲工业革命时期周工作时长的变化，第2、3段是关于美国20世纪早期的周工作时长变化，最后一段则提到了其他国家的工作时长变化，因此B项为最佳答案。文章开头提到的前工业化时代入们的工作时长只是作一个引入而没有展开讲，因此A项错误。C项“比较各个行业的年工作时长”，文章是对国家间不同的时长做了简单比较，并不涉及具体行业，因此排除C项。D项“工业革命时期的工作条件”在文中无涉及。
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