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  3. The current political debate over family values, personal responsibility, and welfare takes for granted the entrenched American

The current political debate over family values, personal responsibility, and welfare takes for granted the entrenched American

admin2010-05-25  33
问题       The current political debate over family values, personal responsibility, and welfare takes for granted the entrenched American belief that dependence on government assistance is a recent and destructive phenomenon. Conservatives tend to blame this dependence on personal irresponsibility aggravated by a swollen welfare apparatus that saps individual initiative. Liberties are more likely to blame it on personal misfortune magnified by the harsh lot that falls to losers in our competitive market economy. But both sides believe that the "winners" in America make it on their own that dependence reflects some kind of individual or family failure, and that the ideal family is the self-reliance unit of the traditional lore—a family that takes care of its own, carves out a future for its children, and never asks for handouts①. Politicians at both ends of the ideological spectrum have wrapped themselves in the mantle of these "family values", arguing over why the poor have not been able to make do without assistance, or whether aid has worsened their situation, but never questioning the assumption that American families traditionally achieve success by establishing their independence from the government.
     The myth of family self-reliance is so compelling that our actual national and personal histories often buckle under its emotional weight. "We successors always stood on our own two feet," my grandfather used to say about his pioneer heritage, whenever he walked me to the top of the hill to survey the property in Washington State that his family had bought for next to nothing after it had been logged off in the early 1900s. Perhaps he didn’t know that the land came so cheap because much of it was part of a federal subsidy originally allotted to the railroad companies, which had received 183 millions acres of the public domain in the nineteenth century. These federal giveaways were the original source of most major western logging companies’ land, and when some of these logging companies moved on to virgin stands of timber, federal lands trickled down to a few early settlers who were able to purchase them inexpensively.
     Like my grandparents, few families in Americans history—whatever their "values"—have been able to rely solely on their own resources. Instead, they have depended on the legislative, judicial and social-support structures set up by governing authorities, whether those were the clan elders of Native American societies, the church courts and city officials of colonial America, or the judicial and legislative bodies established by the Constitution.
     At America’s inception, this was considered not a dirty little secret but the norm,one that confirmed to social and personal interdependence. The idea that the family should have the sole or even primary responsibility for educating and socializing its members, finding them suitable work, or keeping them from poverty and crime was not only ridiculous to colonial and revolutionary thinkers but also dangerously parochial.
The word "parochial" in the last paragraph means
选项 A、backward
B、absurd
C、narrow or provincial
D、wrong
答案C
解析 语义理解题。第三段第一句话说，历史上美国家庭对社会有很大的依赖性；最后一段也说最后一句话，在家庭成员的教育和社会化上，认为家庭应该独自承担责任这种思想在早起思想者看来不仅是荒谬的，而且肯定是不全面的、狭隘的、危险的。选项B与前面的ridiculous意思一致，故排除。A和D程度过重了。
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