非常讨厌这篇文章........
Passage 5 How many really suffer as a result of labor mar- ket problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of hard- (5) ship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it did in the 1930’s when most of the unemployed were primary breadwin- ners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, and when there (10) were no countervailing social programs for those failing in the labor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and improved social welfare pro- (15) tection have unquestionably mitigated the conse- quences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority (20) are from multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an (25) accurate indicator of labor market pathologies. Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labor-market-related hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are (30) so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number experiencing jobless- ness at some time during the year is several times (35)the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the monthly (40) unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the inability to find full-time work, or else outside the labor force but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the elderly, disabled, and depen- (45)dent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those fail- ing in the labor market are adequately protected. As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is (50) uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of thousands or the tens of millions, and, hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tol- erated or must be countered by job creation and (55) economic stimulus. There is only one area of agree- ment in this debate---that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics are inadequate for one their primary applications, measuring the consequences of labor market problems.
???8. The conclusion stated in lines 33-39 about the number of people who suffer as a result of forced idleness depends primarily on the point that (A) in times of high unemployment, there are some people who do not remain unemployed for long (B) the capacity for self-support depends on receiving moderate-to-high wages (C) those in forced idleness include, besides the unemployed, both underemployed part-time workers and those not actively seeking work (D) at different times during the year, different people are unemployed (E) many of those who are affected by unemploy- ment are dependents of unemployed workers 题目到底是什么意思啊. 我觉得问得莫名其妙,答案也是莫名其妙. 是说结论BASE 在某个事实上吗? 也就是总结例子的内容吗 |