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How did modern Western men come to wear trousers and women skirts? As the history of dress evolved, two basic types of clothing

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问题
    How did modern Western men come to wear trousers and women skirts? As the history of dress evolved, two basic types of clothing developed. In warm countries, where weaving was invented more than 10,000 years ago, a draped or wrapped-and-tied style predominated like the Roman toga. In cold countries, by contrast, nomadic people favored clothing made of animal skins cut and sewn together to follow the lines of the body. An intermediate type of clothing was the binary style, made of pieces of fabric sewn together and loosely following the lines of the body. Binary clothes and wrapped garments could be folded flat, unlike the tailored clothes of the north, which fitted together with darts and were three-dimensional. All three types entered the European tradition as a result of cultural contact, population movement and invasion. The same thing happened in China.
    But whereas in Europe, over the centuries, flowing robes became associated with femininity and tailored trousers with masculinity, this was not the case in China, where robes and trousers indicated not different gender, but different social status.
    Trousers seem to have been invented in Persia in the later prehistoric period. They were then adopted by many northern European and central Asian "barbarians" , such as the Saxons. In many cases, barbarian women also wore trousers, especially when horseback riding was part of the nomadic way of life. In the cities of the two empires, however, both men and women of the elite wore long flowing robes. Even after the Roman Empire collapsed into a fragmented feudal Europe, noble men and women continued to wear long, quasi-Roman robes. Peasants wore short robes, and occasionally male peasants wore loose "barbarian" trousers.

    Thus, the indigenous trousers tradition essentially died out in Europe—except in the clothing of soldiers. An aristocrat might wear a long robe at court, but he wore hose-like trousers on the field of battle, often under his armor. European men did not admire trousers, per se, but they did admire soldiers. Women in Europe did not wear trousers because the garment had acquired such strong masculine connotations: what could be more masculine than a soldier?
    In China, soldiers also wore trousers, but Chinese soldiers had no such exalted status, since the Chinese masculine ideal was the scholar-bureaucrat, who wore a robe. In China, peasants of both sexes wore trousers, so there was a basic division between rulers in robes: on the one hand, and peasants and soldiers in trousers on the other. Women could and did wear trousers. Even upper-class Chinese ladies wore trousers for horseback riding or on less formal occasions.
    Back in the medieval Europe, aristocratic men gradually developed a new, high-fashion type of trousers. First, however, they shortened their robes. Not that they adopted the coarse short robes of peasants: rather they developed elaborate and very short robes worn over tight stockings. Eventually, this new robe turned into a doublet, and the top of the stockings into short, puffy bloomers which turned into knee breeches. At the end of the eighteenth century, knee breeches merged with plebian long trousers to become modern men’s pants. Women continued to wear long skirts—very long skirts for high-born women and their middle-class followers, and shorter skirts for peasants and working-class women.
    The Victorians opposed female trousers and short skirts, not so much because they were prudish about female legs, but because they vehemently rejected clothing with mixed gender and class messages. Women could wear bifurcated garments only under special conditions: at fancy dress parties, sometimes for hunting, as part of the bathing dress, and eventually as underpants. A few peasant and pioneer women wore trousers, as did some women who worked in mines.
Questions 66-70:
Answer the following questions with the information given in the passage.
What does the word elite in paragraph 3 mean?
选项
答案It means upper class．
解析 (文章第三段最后一句提到“noble men and women continued to wear long，quasi-Romanrobes．Peasants wore short robes…”，由此可知，elite的意思应与noble相近，表示“贵族”或“上层社会”。)
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本试题收录于： B类竞赛（英语专业本科专科）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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B类竞赛（英语专业本科专科）

大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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