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  3. The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives

The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives

admin2015-07-05  53
问题     The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.
    Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50% , and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25% . Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.
    Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer ( with two professional incomes) and more stable: they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls "Goodnight Moon" time (after a popular book for infants).
    Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time: in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.
    Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th-grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as likely to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores.
    Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential, such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution.
What does Mr. Putnam’s finding about test scores suggest?
选项 A、Students from rich families don’t need to study hard.
B、Parental education affects kids’ academic results greatly.
C、Kids in poor families can hardly graduate from colleges.
D、Family background can make up for academic flaws.
答案B
解析 推理判断题。该段首句指出，家庭背景比八年级测验分数更能准确地预测一个孩子是否能够从大学毕业，并在后一句中具体解释说富裕家庭的孩子即使分数不高，也与贫困家庭分数高的孩子一样有机会从大学毕业。结合上面两段对不同阶层参与教育和教育方式的差别可知，这能够反映出父母的家庭教育对孩子学业成绩的影响，故答案为B)。A)“来自富裕家庭的孩子不必努力学习”，第五段第二句虽然提到考试成绩不及贫困家庭孩子的富裕家庭的学生也有机会从大学毕业，但这主要是说明家庭教育的影响，而不是说他们可以不努力读书，故排除；C)“贫困家庭的孩子几乎很难从大学毕业”，文章并没有比较两种家庭孩子大学毕业的整体情况，更没有说贫困家庭的孩子难以大学毕业，故排除；D)“家庭背景可以弥补学业上的不足”，该句似是而非，原文实际上是说家庭教育可以帮助学生提高学业水平，而不是直接弥补学业上的不足，故排除。
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