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  3. Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during

Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during

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问题     Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during the half century following the Civil War, with some of the most dramatic increases occurring in the domains of transportation, manufacturing, and trade and distribution. The development of the railroad and telegraph systems during the middle third of the nineteenth century led to significant improvements in the speed, volume, and regularity of shipments and communications, making possible a fundamental transformation in the production and distribution of goods.
    In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the emergence of the grain elevators, the cotton presses, the warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so many of the nation’s farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy (阴谋,共谋) against them. In manufacturing, the transformation was marked by the emergence of jobber (批发商，做零工者), the wholesaler, and the mass retailer. And there appeared the new factory system which consisted of the changed organization and complexity of factories as well as the mass scale of the plants. These changes radically altered the nature of work during the half century between 1870 and 1920.
    To be sure, there were still small workshops, where skilled craftspeople manufactured products ranging from newspapers to cabinets to plumbing fixtures (配件，设备). There were the sweatshops in city tenements (廉价公寓), where groups of men and women in household settings manufactured clothing and cigars on a piecework basis. And there were factories in occupa-tions such as metalwork where individual contractors presided over what were essentially handicraft proprietorships (所有权) that coexisted within a single building. But as the number of wage earners in manufacturing rose from 2. 7 million in 1880 to 4. 5 million in 1900 to 8. 4 million in 1920, the number of huge plants like the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia burgeoned, as did the size of the average plant. (The Baldwin Works had 600 employees in 1855, 3 000 in 1875, and 8 000 in 1900). By 1920, at least in the northeastern United States where most of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners were concentrated, three-quarters of those worked in factories with more than 100 employees and 30 percent worked in factories with more than 1 000 employees.
The author mentions the Baldwin Locomotive Works because it was______.
选项 A、a well-known metalwork plant
B、the first plant of its kind in Philadelphia
C、typical of the large factories that were becoming more common
D、typical of factories that consisted of a single building
答案C
解析 本题是一道具体细节题。问作者为什么提到了鲍德温机车厂。文章第三段指出，当然，那时也仍然存在小工厂，但随着在制造业中以挣工资为生的工人人数从1880年270万人增长到1900年的450万人以至于1920年的840万人，费城的鲍得温机车厂这样的大工厂的数量开始增加了，而一般的工厂规模也迅速增长。因此，作者在这里以鲍德温机车厂为例，表明典型的大工厂正在变得很普遍。所以，本题的正确答案应是C。
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