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  3. Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their in

Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their in

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问题     Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their inner kid. They live with their parents far longer than previous generations. They’re getting married later. Even when they have kids, moms and dads download pop songs for their cell phone ringtones, play video games, watch cartoons, and indulge in foods from their childhood. Christopher Noxon explores this Peter Pan culture in his new book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup.
    For rejuveniles today, all roads lead back to Peter Pan and the turn of the twentieth century. The natural capacities of children, which for centuries had been viewed as weak and obstinate were over the course of these few years discovered as a primary source of inspiration and profit. It would be another century before the rejuvenile rebellion we know today, but resistance to what historian Woody Register calls "the weakening prudence, restraint and solemnity of growing up" began here, with the first flight of Pan and the dawn of the twentieth century.
    The temptation today is to think of adulthood as a historic and natural fact. In a 2004 essay on "The Perpetual Adolescent," Joseph Epstein wrote that adulthood was treated as the "lengthiest and most earnest part of life, where everything serious happened." To stray outside the defined boundaries of adulthood, he wrote, was "to go against what was natural and thereby to appear inappropriate, to put one’s world somehow out of joint." Before the Industrial Revolution, no one thought much about adulthood, and even less about childhood. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, "children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, and the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart," notes historian J.H. Plumb.
    This shouldn’t suggest that people in the past didn’t distinguish between kids and grown-ups. Of course they did. The distinction forms the basis of rites of passage that are as old as human history. Amazonian initiation rites, Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, Christian confirmations—all serve the same basic function: to formally announce the end of childhood and the assumption of new duties and freedoms. It’s a mistake, though, to confuse maturity with adulthood. The maturity celebrated in traditional rites of passage is not the same thing as the idea of adulthood hatched a century ago by a group of Victorian clergymen and society ladies. Maturity is old. "Adulthood" is new.
Historian J. H. Plumb’s remarks are cited to show that
选项 A、adults and children had many things in common.
B、adults and children enjoyed a pretty close relationship.
C、both childhood and adulthood are new topics.
D、adulthood is not a historic and natural fact.
答案D
解析 根据J．H．Plumb定位至第三段。他的言论是作为一个反面例证来证明第三段开头那句话：当今，人们非常倾向于将成年看做是具有历史和自然意义的现实。言外之意是成年并不是一个历史概念，故D项正确。
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