Pretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the colour, yet it is pervasive in our young girls’ lives. It

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问题     Pretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the colour, yet it is pervasive in our young girls’ lives. It is not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year-olds, between girls as not only innocent but as evidence of innocence. Looking around, I despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests.
   Girls’ attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletli, an associate professor of American Studies, it is not. Children were not colour-coded at all until the early 20th century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’ s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine colour, a pastel version of red, which was associated will, strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolised femininity. It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children’s marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem inherently attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.
   I had not realised how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts developed after years of research into children’ s behaviour: wrong. Turns out, according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularised as a marketing trick by clothiug manufacturers in the 1930s.
   Trade publications counselled department stores that, in order to increase sales, they should create a "third stepping slime" between infant wear and older kids’ clothes. It was only after "toddler" became a common shoppers’ term that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. Splitting kids, or adults, into ever-tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences--or invent them where they did not previously exist.
According to Paragraph 2, which of the following is true of colours?

选项 A、Colours are encoded in girls’ DNA.
B、Blue used to be regarded as the colour for girls.
C、White is preferred by babies.
D、Pink used to be a neutral colour in symbolising genders.

答案B

解析 判断题。根据第二段第五句Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolised femininity可知,蓝色暗示圣母玛丽亚的坚贞和忠诚,象征着女性气质,故B项“蓝色过去被看做是代表女孩的颜色”为正确答案。第一句提到女孩喜欢粉色似乎不可避免,似乎以某种方式蕴藏在她们的基因里了,随后的but就对前半句进行否定,故A项“颜色蕴藏在女孩的基因里”排除;第三句提到男孩和女孩都穿着人们认为是中性的衣服,指的是上一句提到的白色衣服,而不是粉色衣服,故D项“在代表性别方面,粉色过去被看做是一种中性的颜色”排除;第二句表明在家用洗衣机问世之前,所有的婴儿都穿白色衣服,而不是现在,并且婴儿也不是因为喜欢白色才穿白色衣服的,故C项“现在婴儿更喜欢白色”排除。
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