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  3. Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during

Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during

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问题     Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultur-al pursuits expanded rapidly during the half century following the Civil War, with some of the most dramatic increases occurring in the domains of transportation, manufacturing, and trade and distribution. The development of the railroad and telegraph systems during the middle third of the nineteenth century led to significant improvements in the speed, volume, and regularity of shipments and communications, making possible a fundamental transformation in the production and distribution of goods.
    In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the emergence of the grain elevators, the cotton presses, the warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so many of the nation’s farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy (阴谋,共谋) against them. In manufacturing, the transformation was marked by the emergence of jobber (批发商，做零工者), the wholesaler, and the mass retailer. And there appeared the new factory system which consisted of the changed organization and complexity of factories as well as the mass scale of the plants. These changes radically altered the nature of work during the half century between 1870 and 1920.
    To be sure, there were still small workshops, where skilled craftspeople manufactured products ranging from newspapers to cabinets to plumbing fixtures (配件，设备). There were the sweatshops in city tenements (廉价公寓), where groups of men and women in household settings manufactured clothing and cigars on a piecework basis. And there were factories in occupa-tions such as metalwork where individual contractors presided over what were essentially handicraft proprietorships (所有权) that coexisted within a single building. But as the number of wage earners in manufacturing rose from 2. 7 million in 1880 to 4. 5 million in 1900 to 8. 4 million in 1920, the number of huge plants like the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia burgeoned, as did the size of the average plant. (The Baldwin Works had 600 employees in 1855, 3 000 in 1875, and 8 000 in 1900). By 1920, at least in the northeastern United States where most of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners were concentrated, three-quarters of those worked in factories with more than 100 employees and 30 percent worked in factories with more than 1 000 employees.
What can be inferred from the passage about the agricultural sector of the economy after the Civil War?
选项 A、New technological developments had little effect on farmers.
B、The percentage of the total population working in agriculture declined.
C、Many farms destroyed in the war were rebuilt after the war.
D、Farmers achieved new prosperity because of better rural transportation.
答案B
解析 本题是一道根据具体细节推断类问题。问从文章中我们可以推断出美国内战后农业发展如何。根据文章第一段第一句，在美国内战后的半个世纪中，参与非农业工作的人口数量和人口比例都大大地增加了，增长最快的是交通业、制造业、贸易和产品分销业这些领域。由此我们可推断出仍然从事农业的人口比例下降。因此，本题的正确答案应是B。
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