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  3. Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their in

Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their in

admin2021-09-17  51
问题     Boys and girls used to grow up and set aside their childish pursuits. Not anymore. These days, men and women hold on to their inner kid. They live with their parents far longer than previous generations. They’re getting married later. Even when they have kids, moms and dads download pop songs for their cell phone ringtones, play video games, watch cartoons, and indulge in foods from their childhood. Christopher Noxon explores this Peter Pan culture in his new book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup.
    For rejuveniles today, all roads lead back to Peter Pan and the turn of the twentieth century. The natural capacities of children, which for centuries had been viewed as weak and obstinate were over the course of these few years discovered as a primary source of inspiration and profit. It would be another century before the rejuvenile rebellion we know today, but resistance to what historian Woody Register calls "the weakening prudence, restraint and solemnity of growing up" began here, with the first flight of Pan and the dawn of the twentieth century.
    The temptation today is to think of adulthood as a historic and natural fact. In a 2004 essay on "The Perpetual Adolescent," Joseph Epstein wrote that adulthood was treated as the "lengthiest and most earnest part of life, where everything serious happened." To stray outside the defined boundaries of adulthood, he wrote, was "to go against what was natural and thereby to appear inappropriate, to put one’s world somehow out of joint." Before the Industrial Revolution, no one thought much about adulthood, and even less about childhood. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, "children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, and the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart," notes historian J.H. Plumb.
    This shouldn’t suggest that people in the past didn’t distinguish between kids and grown-ups. Of course they did. The distinction forms the basis of rites of passage that are as old as human history. Amazonian initiation rites, Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, Christian confirmations—all serve the same basic function: to formally announce the end of childhood and the assumption of new duties and freedoms. It’s a mistake, though, to confuse maturity with adulthood. The maturity celebrated in traditional rites of passage is not the same thing as the idea of adulthood hatched a century ago by a group of Victorian clergymen and society ladies. Maturity is old. "Adulthood" is new.
To which of the following statements will Joseph Epstein most probably agree?
选项 A、Considering adulthood as historic and natural is dangerous.
B、Adulthood is the longest and most important period in our life.
C、Since you are an adult, you should behave like an adult.
D、Adulthood is not necessarily a historic and natural period in one’s life.
答案C
解析 根据Joseph Epstein定位至第三段。其中他提到，游离于“成人”边界之外，就是“违反自然，因此就会表现异常，会让一个人的世界从某种程度上来说处于混乱状态”，可见他不赞同成年人“扮嫩”，因此C项正确。
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