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  3. The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives

The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives

admin2015-07-05  135
问题     The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.
    Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50% , and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25% . Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.
    Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer ( with two professional incomes) and more stable: they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls "Goodnight Moon" time (after a popular book for infants).
    Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time: in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.
    Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th-grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as likely to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores.
    Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential, such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution.
In the passage, the author mainly discusses________.
选项 A、how parents should bring up their children
B、how family background influences schooling
C、what the greatest barrier to social mobility is
D、various classes educate kids differently
答案B
解析 主旨大意题。本文第一段提到，在美国最重要的差别是阶级，不是种族，而这种差别影响最大的地方是家庭；第二段具体阐述家庭的差别，即非婚生子，然后接着总结：阶层差异拉大了，而种族差异缩小了；接下来的四段提到，不同阶层的家庭给孩子提供的家庭影响、机遇和教育方式均有不同，并由此影响到孩子在学校的成绩。可见，作者讨论的重点在于“家庭背景对学业的影响”，故答案为B)。A)“父母应该怎样养育孩子”，文中只提到不同阶层父母的养育方式存在差别，没有提及应该怎样教育孩子，故可排除；C)“社会流动性最大的障碍是什么”，第四段提到贫困家庭的教育方式阻碍了社会流动，但没有提到这是社会流动性最大的障碍，故可排除；D)“不同阶层教育孩子的方式大相径庭”，文章重点讨论了不同家庭背景对孩子教育的影响，具体各阶层如何教育孩子并没有论及，故可排除。
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