Pretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the colour, yet it is pervasive in our young girls’ lives. It

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问题    Pretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the colour, yet it is pervasive in our young girls’ lives. It is not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year-olds, between girls as not only innocent but as evidence of innocence. Looking around, I despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests.
   Girls’ attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies, it is not. Children were not colour-coded at all until the early 20th century, in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine colour, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children’ s marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem inherently attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.
   I had not realised how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts developed after years of research into children’ s behavior: wrong. Turns out, according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularized as a marketing trick by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s.
   Trade publications counselled department stores that, in order to increase sales, they should create a "third stepping stone" between infant wear and older kids’ clothes. It was only after "toddler" became a common shoppers’ term that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. Splitting kids, or adults, into ever-tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences—or invent them where they did not previously exist.
According to Paragraph 2, which of the following is true of colours?

选项 A、Colours are encoded in girls’ DNA.
B、Blue used to be regarded as the colour for girls.
C、Pink used to be a neutral colour in symbolising genders.
D、White is preferred by babies.

答案B

解析 细节题。根据关键词定位到第二段,由“Blue,…symbolized femininity”可知蓝色曾经被认 为是女孩子的颜色,B项符合题意,故为正确答案。根据文章第二段第一句话,前半部分是说“女 孩对于粉色的关注看起来好像是不可避免的,好像基因里就这样决定了”,but之后是对前者的 否定,故A项不对;根据第二段的第6行“pink was actually considered the more masculine colour” 可以看出C项也不对;根据第二段第4、5行,可以得知,孩子们穿白色是属于以前的情况,并非现 在的事实,而D项的时态是指一般现在时,时态不符合。
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