Miserabilists’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth; all these thin

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问题     Miserabilists’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth; all these things ensure a ready hearing for claims that childhood is in crisis. Britons are especially worried. They fear that the young today are sadder than previous generations— stressed, and turned off learning by too much testing. Children may be nastier as well: bullying is an "epidemic" in schools, according to one recent survey. They seem in danger like never before.
    No wonder a report published on February 2nd by the Children’s Society, entitled "A Good Childhood”, claiming that far too few British children have one, has received widespread notice. Children suffer because adults put their own needs first, the panel concluded, and only a wholesale shift away from competitiveness and individualism can save them. Right-wing commentators agreed with its criticism of single parents and working mothers, left-wing ones with its call for more redistribution of income and less-advertising to children. Both overlooked one striking finding; that most children are doing just fine.
    Amid the statistics on teenage pregnancy rates (higher than elsewhere in Europe, lower than in America), mental illness (a tenth of 5-16-year-olds are sufferers) and drunkenness (a third of 13-15-year-olds have been drunk at least twice, a share three times higher than the European average) , came some more heartening figures: 70% of 11-16-year-olds say they are very, or completely , happy, and only 4% say that they are at all unhappy. The report rolls the latter in with the 9% of children who describe themselves as neither happy nor unhappy to claim that 13% are "less than happy". But clearly, very few children agree with adults that they are in deep trouble.
    In "Reclaiming Childhood”, Helene Guldberg, a child psychologist at the Open University, examines the same facts and draws different conclusions. Rising rates of mental illness among the young, she argues, reflect readier diagnosis, and bullying has increased because the word is now used to mean the infliction of even the slightest emotional bruise. She thinks many attempts to improve children’s lives, such as anti-bullying campaigns, and the parenting lessons proposed by the Children’s Society, are likely to be counterproductive. "Suggesting that all parents need to be taught how to do their job risks creating a self-fulfilling belief in parents’ incompetence and children’s lack of resilience," she says.
    Britain is no Utopia, of course. As in other rich countries, children find it too easy to sit indoors, staring at screens and overeating. They lack the protection afforded by the Nordic belief in the sacredness of outdoor play, or the shared family meals of Mediterranean countries. A large minority ape their elders’ drinking habits and a few, but still too many, become parents while still children themselves.
Britons are worried about the following EXCEPT that

选项 A、children’s learning is crammed with too much testing.
B、they are confronted with a lot of hardships in their life.
C、there is more and more school violence in Britain today.
D、young Britons today are sadder than previous generations.

答案B

解析 细节题。题目问的是“英国人对下面哪一个情况不担忧?”根据第一段第三句可知,D项:年轻的英国人要比上一代更悲观;A项:孩子的学习有太多的测试了。再根据第一段第四句可知,C项:校园暴力越来越多。因此A、C和D项都是英国人担心的事情。而B项:他们在生活中遭遇了很多不幸。原文并未提及,他们对自己这代人的担心,故选B。
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