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

游客2023-12-26  30

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] The following are the worries and concerns of millennials EXCEPT______.

选项 A、unstable jobs
B、longing for love and marriage
C、pressure from parents
D、immature mentality

答案 C

解析 是非排除题型,答案是C。本题考查千禧一代烦恼和关注的问题,由出现在第二段开头的线索词the same concerns可将考查点锁定在第一段。逐一对比四选项可见:A选项为文中原词,B选项(渴望恋爱结婚)是基于delayed romance(迟来的爱情)的正确理解,D选项(心态不成熟)是基于delayed maturity(晚熟)的正确理解。唯有C选项(父母施加压力)是对parenthood一词的曲解,原文实际意为“生儿育女,为人父母”。本题核心:仔细甄别原文中字词及语法的结构。字词层面的理解应善用构词法,如parenthood由词干parent和词缀hood组成,据此可推知该词的正确含义为“做父母的状态”;语法层面的理解应找准搭配关系,如应明确delayed一词修饰的并非romance,而是romance、parenthood和maturity三个并列成分。
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