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

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

游客2023-12-26  34
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 word "chronic" underlined in Paragraph 6 is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、severe
B、temporary
C、persistent
D、chronological
答案 C
解析 词义题型，答案是C。chronic意为“长期的”，A选项意为“严重的”，B选项意为“暂时性的”，C选项意为“持久的”，D选项意为“按时间顺序的”。本题核心：可联系上下文推测词义，在此过程中还需留意相搭配的词汇。后文举例称年轻人的工作可能这周有下周无，可见对年轻人而言，稳定状态是短暂的，不稳定状态是长期的。如果不留意原文搭配词汇instability的否定性前缀，可能会误选B选项。
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