2. 职称英语
  3. In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their

游客2024-01-13  39
问题     In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contri- bution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $ 750,000.
    The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the "useful" child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the "useless" child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally " priceless." Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800’ s, this new view of childhood spread throughout society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory educa- tion laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child’ s emotional value made child labor taboo.
    For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty)were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children’ s worth. Yet "expulsion of children from the ’ cash nexus’.. . although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures," Zelizer maintains, "was also part of a cultural process ’ of sacralization’ of children’ s lives." Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.
    In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s worth, Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new "sociological economics," who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual " preferences," these sociologists tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their "exchange" or "surrender" value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater. [br] The primary purpose of the passage is to
选项 A、review the literature in a new academic subfield.
B、present the central thesis of a recent book.
C、contrast two approaches to analyzing historical change.
D、refute a traditional explanation of a social phenomenon.
E、encourage further work on a neglected historical topic.
答案 B
解析 本文主要目的：A．“new academic subfield”。无。B．对最近一本书提出主题。正确。阐明Zelizer在其最近著作中的主张。C．对比两个分析历史变化的观点。易混。作者在最后一段提出的Zelizer观点的对立面，社会政治学家只是补充说明，而不是本文的主题内容。D．驳斥对一社会现象的传统解释。无。E．鼓励将来继续研究一被忽视的历史课题。无。
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