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  3. A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadw

A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadw

admin2015-03-25  25
问题     A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadwinning fathers are unlikely to provoke moral panic, the public’s interest in how working women raise their children is easily provoked. One of Britain’s biggest-selling newspapers proclaimed fearfully on Friday: "Three in four middle-class mothers continue to work after having a baby, a study shows... The figures point to a relentless rise in the number of working mothers of very young children. "
    Conducted by researchers at University College London, it surveyed 19,000 British households to determine how parental employment affects a child’s behaviour throughout the first five years of life.
    The results will startle those who think that children benefit from having a stay-at-home mum. In fact, the paper indicates that maternal employment can often improve the chances of having well-adjusted kids. For example, five-year-olds whose mothers had been at home when they were babies were more likely to have behavioural problems than other children. For each child, the longer the time their mother was off work, the more annoying bratty was the child’s behaviour.
    Of course, life can rarely be boiled down to simple equations of cause and effect. What complicates this picture is the correlation between work patterns and other factors like lower household income, poorer education and depression, which might affect whether a woman chooses to go to work. Interestingly, when the study adjusted for these factors, the relationship between bad behaviour and maternal unemployment remained strong for girls but not for boys. This may reflect, the authors said, "the importance of gender in family role model processes"— the inference being that girls benefit from having a mother as an exemplar of a woman who is successful and independent, while the effect is less pronounced for boys.
    The paper also looked at the working arrangements of all adults in the household. Once again, the trends differed by sex. Boys, but not girls, were likely to suffer from their mother being the sole breadwinner, although once the results were adjusted for income, education and depression, the detrimental impact on boys disappeared. Boys thrived equally in homes where both parents were working, and in two-parent "traditional" families in which their mothers stayed at home. Girls, in contrast, appeared to have significantly fewer problems where both parents were employed than in traditional homes.
    The study also has its limitations. It restricted its analysis to white children because of problems with sampling other ethnicities. Statistically, that is not a huge drawback; 92% of Britons identified themselves as white in the 2001 census. A bigger issue is the way the data were collected, involving questionnaires about children’s behaviour, almost always answered by mothers. Working mums know that they are vulnerable to criticism from certain sections of society and the media; when surveyed, this might incline them to paint defensively rosy portraits of their children, and so to skew the results.
Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
选项 A、Ethnic Problems Facing Kids’ Development
B、Gender Differences in Family Education
C、Family’s Influence on Kids’ Nurture Development
D、Working Mothers’ Influences on Their Kids
答案D
解析 主旨大意题。本文开篇提出职业母亲对孩子的影响。接下来的几段主要描述和评论与该主题相关的一项研究的结果。因此，[D]与全文主题相符，故为答案。[C]的叙述过于笼统，故排除；虽然文中也涉及gender differences，但并非讨论的重点，故排除。
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