xdf-17-5（阅读精解电子版Passage-30-5)

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PASSAGE 30
*Since the early 1970's, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know
5) remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930's. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as
10) Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massa- chusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.
*
15 ) The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depres- sion standards: during the worst years, in the 1870's and 1890's, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to
20) measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies—measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.
*
25) Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unem-
30) ployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent onthe same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon
35) that has puzzled historians—the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assis- tance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help
40) and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.
* While Keyssar might have spent more time develop- ing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough
45) research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.

5. Which of the following statements about theunemployment rate during the Great Depression can beinferred from the passage?
(A) It was sometimes higher than 15 percent.
(B) It has been analyzed seriously only since the early1970's.
(C) It can be calculated more easily than canunemployment frequency.
(D) It was never as high as the rate during the 1870's.
(E) It has been shown by Keyssar to be lower thanpreviously thought.

正确答案是A，用排除法后只剩下这一项,但从文中看来，in the 1870's and 1890's, unemployment was around 15 percent,但the Great Depression of the 1930's，从时间上看来，A项依旧不能推出，请指教。

xealot

) The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to berelatively modest, at least by Great Depres- sion standards: during theworst years, in the 1870's and 1890's, unemployment was around 15percent.

Apparently, "15 persent" is relatively modest comparing the GreatDepression stardard, and hence the Great Depression persentage shouldbe fiercer that 15 persent...

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谢谢楼上的GG

太不仔细了，呵呵