A、Who takes care of old people? B、Who volunteers at the children’s school? C、Who pay the rent? D、Who cooks and cleans? C

Have you ever seen an old American television show from the 1950s? If you have, try to picture the typical family that appears in those shows. There’s father, who puts on a suit and goes to work every day. There’s mother, who takes care of the house and children. And there are usually two or three children, and maybe a dog. In those days, that was considered to be a typical American family.
   But today, the typical American family looks very different. Consider these statistics: in 1965, only 35% of American women worked outside the home. Ten years later, in 1975, it jumped to 55%. And today, close to 80% of American women work outside the home.
   Why is that? Well, there are two important reasons why most American women now work. The first one, very simply, is that they need the money. These days the cost of living is so high that most families need two paychecks in order to make ends meet.
   The other reason why women are working in larger and larger numbers is that they have more opportunities than they did 30 or 40 years ago. There are laws in the United States that give women the same opportunity as men to go to college and get jobs. As a result, women today are working in professions that were not as open to them 30 or 40 years ago. To give just one example, today more than half the students in American medical schools are women.
   So, to summarize so far, we’ve seen that the American family has changed dramatically since the days of those old television shows. In the typical family both the father and the mother have jobs. This means that most American homes don’t have a full-time homemaker anymore, and that creates new problems for families, such as who takes care of babies and old people; who shops, cooks, and cleans; who volunteers at the children’s school and so on.
   Now, as the American family has changed, American businesses have changed too. More and more companies understand that people can’t do good work if they’re worried about their kids or if they’re under a lot of stress. As a result, some companies are trying to help their workers with flexible policies and new programs that benefit working families.
   For most people, trying to work and taking care of a family at the same time is still very, very difficult. In my opinion, our government and our society need to do a lot more to help working parents and their children.
23. What was the percentage of American women worked outside home in 1975?
24.Which statement is NOT the reason why most American women work now?
25.Which one is NOT a problem for two-paycheck families?
26.What are some companies trying to do for their workers?