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Since the early 1970’s, historianshave begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the UnitedStates. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture,we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attentionat all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the1930’s. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions andjoblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recentbook. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts,where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findingsapplicable to other industrial areas. The unemployment rates that Keyssarcalculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depressionstandards: during the worst years, in the 1870’s and 1890’s, unemployment wasaround 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measurethe impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies—measuringthe percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of(in the course of: adv.在...期间) ayear. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger. Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patternsaccording to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He findsthat rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those inmiddle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to beunemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not alwaysthe same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities couldhave dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differentialrates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians—the startlinglyhigh rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. Butmobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping withunemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies.Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.
While Keyssar mighthave spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessnessfor contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research andcreative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historicalanalysis.
4、According to the passage, which ofthe following is true of the unemployment rates mentioned in line 15?(A) They hovered, on average,around 15 percent during the period 1870-1920. (B) They give less than a full sense of the impact of unemployment onworking-class people. (C) They overestimate theimportance of middle class and white-collar unemployment. (D) They have been considered bymany historians to underestimate the extent of working-class unemployment.（B） (E)They are more open to question when calculated for years other than those ofpeak recession.
大家给看看，这题我做的时候愣没选出来，猜了一个。题干according to passage，我找原文没能找到B的意思，为啥选B。
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发表于 2014-10-6 10:21:26
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