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  3. Far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counti

Far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counti

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问题    Far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35% in 2005 to just 26% now. Yet nearly 10m fewer women are in jobs. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU has of either gender, and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia.
   Imagine the repercussions. Were India to rebalance its workforce in this way, the IMF estimates, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer. Its people would be well on their way to middle-income status. Beyond the obvious economic benefits are the incalculable human ones. Women who work are likelier to invest more in their children’s upbringing, and to have more say over how they lead their lives.
   Social mores are startlingly conservative. A girl’s first task is to persuade her own family that she should have a job. The in-laws she will typically move in with after marriage are even more likely to yank her out of the workforce and into social isolation. In a survey in 2012, 84% of Indians agreed that men have more right to work than women when jobs are scarce. Men have taken 90% of the 36m additional jobs in industry India has created since 2005. And those who say that women themselves prefer not to work must contend with plenty of counter-evidence. Census data suggest that a third of stay-at-home women would work if jobs were available; government make-work schemes attract more women than men.
   What can be done? Many of the standard answers fall short. Promoting education, a time-tested development strategy, may not succeed. Figures show that the more schooling an Indian woman receives, the less likely she is to work, at least if she has anything less than a university degree. Likewise urbanization, another familiar way to alleviate poverty: city-dwelling women are half as likely as rural ones to have a job.
   An optimist might argue that more women are not working because India is still paying for the sins of the past, when so many of them were illiterate and high fertility rates bound them to the home. Most measures of female welfare are improving. India has many more girls in classrooms and fewer child brides than it once did.
   In fact, many fear that all that extra schooling was a parental ploy to improve a daughter’s prospects not in the labour market but in the arranged-marriage market, part of the all-important quest to snag a suitable boy. A further push is needed to get Indian women what they really need: a suitable job.
The word "mores" (Para. 3) is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、customs
B、regulations
C、mainstreams
D、standpoints
答案A
解析 词汇理解题。根据定位词定位到文章第三段。原文指出，社会______惊人地保守。保守通常用来形容社会风俗，由下文也可知此处指风俗习惯，故A项为正确选项。
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