Passage 49 (49/63) Historians of women’s labor in the United States at first largely disregarded the story of female service workers—women earning wages in occupations such as salesclerk (salesclerk: n.商店里的店员), domestic servant, and office secretary. These historians focused instead on factory work, primarily because it seemed so different from traditional, unpaid “women’s work” in the home, and because the underlying economic forces of industrialism were presumed to be gender-blind and hence emancipatory in effect (in effect: in substance: VIRTUALLY “the T committee agreed to what was in effect a reduction in the hourly wage Current Biography”). Unfortunately, emancipation has been less profound than expected, for not even industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex segregation in the workplace.
To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of women, historians have recently begun to emphasize the way a prevailing definition of femininity often determines the kinds of work allocated to women, even when such allocation is inappropriate to new conditions. For instance, early textile-mill entrepreneurs, in justifying women’s employment in wage labor, made much of the assumption that women were by nature (by nature: adv.生来) skillful at detailed tasks and patient in carrying out repetitive chores; the mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order hoary stereotypes associated with the homemaking activities they presumed to have been the purview of women. Because women accepted the more unattractive new industrial tasks more readily than did men, such jobs came to be regarded as female jobs. And employers, who assumed that women’s “real” aspirations were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as “female.”
More remarkable than the origin has been the persistence of such sex segregation in twentieth-century industry. Once an occupation came to be perceived as “female.” employers showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profits beckoned. And despite the urgent need of the United States during the Second World War to mobilize its human resources fully, job segregation by sex characterized even the most important war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers quickly returned to men most of the “male” jobs that women had been permitted to master.
7. Which of the following words best expresses the opinion of the author of the passage concerning the notion that women are more skillful than men in carrying out detailed tasks?
(A) “patient” (line 21)
(B) “repetitive” (line 21)
(C) “hoary” (line 22)
(D) “homemaking” (line 23)（C）
(E) “purview” (line 24)
请问这道题是怎么做出来的？什么思路啊？请NN指点。。。作者: edwardelric 时间: 2010-2-7 07:12
这题要读懂第二段~ made much of the assumption that women were by nature (by nature: adv.生来) skillful at detailed tasks and patient in carrying out repetitive chores; the mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order hoary stereotypes associated with the homemaking activities they presumed to have been the purview of women. Because women accepted the more unattractive new industrial tasks more readily than did men, such jobs came to be regarded as female jobs. And employers, who assumed that women’s “real” aspirations were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as “female.”[/ 作者的态度的体现词语，关于skillful 的，我注意到了一个强因果的关系词是because，看到的是在说女人接受不具有吸引力的工作要比男人更好，because在本文无第三方阐述时候是作者态度的词语~，unattractive对应hoary陈旧 我在b c 上考虑了一下，c要比d更直接，另外c在thus后面，之在前文的阐述下产生的现象，更侧重答案的方向， 所以还是c作者: lxw19 时间: 2010-2-7 21:48
恩，谢谢ls的解释，明白了，，，
