2. 外语
  3. Historians may well look back on the 1980s in the United States as a time of rising affluence side by side with rising poverty.

Historians may well look back on the 1980s in the United States as a time of rising affluence side by side with rising poverty.

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问题      Historians may well look back on the 1980s in the United States as a time of rising affluence side by side with rising poverty. The growth in affluence is attributable to an increase in professional and technical jobs, along with more two career couples whose combined incomes provide a "comfortable living". Yet simultaneously, the nation’s poverty rate rose between 1973 and 1983 from 11.1 percent of the population to 15.2, or by well over a third. Although the poverty rate declined somewhat after 1983, it was still held at 13.5 percent in 1987, comprising a population of 32.5 million Americans.
     The definition of poverty is a matter of debate. In 1795, a group of English magistrates decided that a minimum in-come should be "the cost of a gallon loaf of bread, multiplied by three, plus an allowance for each dependent". Today the Census Bureau defines the threshold of poverty in the United States as the minimum amount of money that families need to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet, assuming they use one third of their income for food. Using this definition, roughly half the American population was poor in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1950, the proportion of the poor had fallen to 30 percent and by 1964, to 20 percent. With the adoption of the Johnson administration’s antipoverty pro-grams, the poverty rate dropped to 12 percent in 1969. But since then, it has stopped falling. Liberals contend that the poverty line is too low because it fails to take into account changes in the standard of living. Conservatives say that it is too high because the poor receive other forms of public assistance, including food stamps, public housing subsidies, and health care.
In the eighties, Americans as a whole _________.
选项 A、became richer
B、became poorer
C、lived a poorer life than in the seventies
D、needed more jobs to support their families
答案A
解析 文章第一句指出，美国的80年代可以被看作是贫富人口俱增的时代。第二句分析了富裕户增长的原因，第三句给出了贫困率增长的幅度。虽然存在着这两方面的倾向，但就其总体而言(as a whole，见提问)，美国人的生活水平应该是提高了的。
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