[求助]XDF-5

ypngzhang

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-
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  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
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  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 dataalso 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
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  accurate indicator of labor market pathologies.
* Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labor-market-relatedhardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are
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  so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemploymentfrequently 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 workingpart-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
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  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
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  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 of their primary applications, measuring theconsequences of labor market problems.

7. According to the passage, one factor that causesunemployment and earnings figures to overpredictthe amount of economic hardship is the
(A) recurrence of periods of unemployment for agroup of low-wage workers
(B) possibility that earnings may be received frommore than one job per worker
(C) fact that unemployment counts do not includethose who work for low wages and remain poor
(D) establishment of a system of record-keeping thatmakes it possible to compile poverty statistics
(E) prevalence, among low-wage workers and theunemployed, of members of families in whichothers are employed
 

请教NN，文章中那段红色的字是什么意思？第7题E答案中的prevalence是什么意思？谢谢。帮我翻译一下。

[此贴子已经被作者于2006-12-1 18:39:04编辑过]

ypngzhang

这两个问题，已经在msn上有GG帮忙讲解，明白了。

多谢！！！