[求助]og-7，对37和41题时间状语的理解问题

tania

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for (sue for: v.控告) damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three-year-old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $750,000.

The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the “useful” child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the “useless” child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally “priceless.” Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread throughout society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory education (compulsory education: n.义务教育) laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child’s emotional value made child labor taboo.

For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth. Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus (cash nexus: 金钱关系, 现金(交易)关系),’ although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer maintains, “was also part of a cultural process ‘of sacrelization’ of children’s lives.” Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.

In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s worth, Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new “sociological economics,” who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual “preferences,” these sociologists tend to view all human behaviors as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their “exchange” or “surrender” value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater.

37. It can be inferred from the passage that accidental-death damage awards in America during the nineteenth century tended to be based principally on the

(A) earnings of the person at time of death

(B) wealth of the party causing the death

(C) degree of culpability of the party causing the death

(D) amount of money that had been spent on the person killed（A）

               (E) amount of suffering endured by the family of the person killed

41.It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following statements was true of American families over the course of the nineteenth century?

(A) The average size of families grew considerably.

(B) The percentage of families involved in industrial work declined dramatically.

(C) Family members became more emotionally bonded to one another.

(D) Family members spent an increasing amount of time working with each other.（C）

               (E) Family members became more economically dependent on each other.

我的问题是37题和41题中的时间段是一致的吗？都是指19世纪吗？如果都是指19世纪，那为何41题选C不选E呢？我觉得是我对during the nineteenth century 和over the course of the nineteenth century的理解有问题，但又不知问题在哪，请大家帮帮我！

wangyu73cn

当然是同一时间段，对时间的理解应不是问题。但需要注意这段时间内的过程变化。请参照：

http://forum.chasedream.com/dispbbs.asp?BoardID=25&ID=104415

tania

我明白了，谢谢！！！41题是指在整个19世纪的过程中，是一个时间过程的概念，在这个过程中，美国家庭成员在感情上更加互相依赖了。

swlfx

楼主这么认真，学习。