2. 外语
  3. Since the early 1970’ s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while

Since the early 1970’ s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while

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问题     Since the early 1970’ s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to  the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930’ s. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870 -1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.
    The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depression standards: during the worst years, in the 1870’s and 1890’s, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies— measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.
    Keyssar also scrutinizes unemploy- ment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupa- tions were far less likely to be unemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians— the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells. While Keyssar might have spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.
According to the passage, which of the following is true of the unemployment rates mentioned in line 19?
选项 A、They hovered, on average, around 15 percent during the period 1870 — 1920.
B、They give less than a full sense of the impact of unemployment on working-class people.
C、They overestimate the importance of middle class and white-collar unemployment.
D、They have been considered by many historians to underestimate the extent of working-class unemployment.
E、They are more open to question when calculated for years other than those of peak recession.
答案B
解析 L19提到的失业率，以下哪种说法是对的：A．在1870～1920年平均15％。原文L22—24，最严重时是15％，平均值肯定比这要低。B．正确。它们对于失业给工人阶级的影响不能提供一个全面的认识。文中L24—30。K认为检测失业频率是更好地确定失业现象严重与否的方式，因此算出失业率应是相对来说较不准确的方法。C．高估中产阶级、白领重要性。这是K以后研究的内容，在第三段。D．“many historians to underestimate”在文中无法推出。我们可以说：肯定此失业率不准确的，只有K一个人。E．当计算除衰退高峰以外的年份时，问题更多。原文无。
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