SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
In this section there are three passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.
PASSAGE ONE
(1) Ole and Lena are a mythical Swedish-American couple, probably residing somewhere in Minnesota, notable for their remarkably dysfunctional marriage. One story goes like this:
(2) Ole and Lena have grown old, and one day Ole becomes very sick. Eventually, he is confined to his upstairs bedroom, barely conscious, bedridden, and growing ever weaker. After several weeks of this, the doctor visits and tells Lena: "Vell, Ole"s just about a goner. I don"t think he"ll survive the night." So Lena, being a practical woman, decides she had better start preparing for all the guests who will be coming to the funeral. She begins to bake, starting with loaves of limpa, a Swedish sweet rye bread. The pleasant smell of baking bread is soon wafting through the house. Suddenly, upstairs, Ole"s nose twitches and his eyes bolt open. "Limpa," he says. He jerks up into a sitting position, swings his legs around, and climbs out of bed. It"s like a miracle! Half walking, half stumbling, he crosses the room, enters the hallway, and starts working his way down the stairs. "Limpa," he says again. He reaches the ground floor, stumbles across the kitchen, and pulls himself into a chair by a table where a loaf of freshly sliced bread sits. He reaches over to take a slice. "Stop that, Ole!" shouts Lena, as she whaps his hand with her spatula. "That limpa bread is for after the funeral."
(3) We can laugh at Ole and Lena because they are now out of time, characters from an earlier era of Swedish immigration to America. Their "ideal type," we might say, no longer exists. More importantly, their dysfunctional marriage also belongs to another era. Several generations ago, when there were real Oles and Lenas, divorce would have been rare in their community. For better and worse, couples remained in unhappy or troubled marriages, perhaps "for the sake of the children," perhaps for other cultural or religious reasons.
(4) Successful jokes usually involve making fun of institutions that are strong and stable. The "marriage joke", a staple of comedians during the 1950s and 1960s, seems to be fading in our time. Symbolically, Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps the last master of the marriage joke, died recently.
(5) It is hard to make fun of an institution that is battered and bruised. Such are marriage and the family in America. Marriage rates are now at record lows in our country. The average age of first marriage is at a record high, for both men and women. The proportion of adults who will never marry is also at a record level. At the same time, the marital fertility rate in America is at a record low. Meanwhile, 40 percent of all births are now outside of wedlock, and this figure is steadily climbing. Cohabitation—"living together without benefit of clergy," as we used to say—grows ever more popular as an alternative to marriage. While the American divorce rate has been fairly stable for a decade or two, it remains at a high level: one of every two marriages still ends in divorce. Finally, "gay rights activists" are clamoring for the right to marry, with some—if uneven—success among the states.
(6) There are those, such as Harvard historian Nancy Cott, who argue that these changes simply represent the inevitable evolution of marriage and family, a natural adaptation of a malleable, plastic-like institution to new conditions. Industrialization, modernization, and the quest for equality, Cott concludes, have freed marriage from the shackles of the past, allowing it to evolve into a higher and better form.
(7) There is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution brought new pressures to bear on what I prefer to call the Natural Family. At the most basic level, this process severed the workplace from the home. For all of human history up to that time, the great majority of humans had lived and worked in the same place, be it a small farm or an artisan"s shop or a nomad"s tent. Under the industrial regime, though, adults were pulled out of their homes to labor in factories or offices. Serious complications arose over matters such as sex or gender roles and the care of children.
(8) However, in most of Europe and North America, families recovered a significant degree of autonomy through "family wage" regimes. Constructed by religious leaders, social reformers, and morally grounded labor unions, family wage systems limited the intrusion of the industrial principle into the family circle. These systems held that the factories could hire only one person per household, normally the husband and father, and that that person should receive a family sustaining wage. For working-class women, "liberation" came to mean freedom from having to work in the factories. This allowed mothers to focus on maintaining autonomous homes and caring for children. In this way, the natural family rooted in marriage and focused on procreation and child-rearing accommodated itself to the new industrial era.
(9) It is also true, though, that "family-wage" regimes of this kind largely vanished during the last three decades of the twentieth century and are now mostly forgotten. Feminist historians, such as Nancy Cott, see this as an important and most welcome step in the evolution of marriage and family. A more accurate interpretation is that the disappearance of these regimes has been a major cause of the deterioration of marriage and family life seen since 1965; while such systems had flaws, nothing compensated for the loss of their strengths. Moreover, rather than being an aspect of social evolution, this transformation of private life was the direct result of an ideological project designed to create a post-family order.
(10) This unique ideological effort had both socialist and feminist roots. It was expressed most clearly in Sweden, the ancestral home of Ole and Lena.
PASSAGE TWO
(1) Among the quality, courtship before the middle of the seventeenth century was usually a stilted and formal affair of short duration and limited significance. The procedure took two forms. The first was the selection of a possible spouse by the parents or friends, after careful examination of his or her economic prospects, and preliminary agreement with the other set of parents and friends about the terms of the financial settlement. The couple were then brought together, in order to discover whether or not they found each other personally obnoxious. If no strong negative feelings were aroused, the couple normally consented, the marriage settlement was signed, and the arrangement for a formal church wedding went forward. Alternatively, a man might meet or see a girl in a public place, in church, or at a ball or party. If he was attracted to her, he would approach her parents and friends and formally ask their permission to court her. If investigation proved that he was financially and personally suitable, permission was granted and courting went forward, with all the usual rituals of visits, conversation, gifts, and expressions of love and devotion.
(2) These requests to parents or guardians for permission to pay court were normally made in person, but occasionally they were put in writing, which allows the historian a view of the formalities which surrounded such occasions. One such letter was written in 1755 by a relatively impecunious clergyman in Nottinghamshire to a Mrs. Neville, seeking permission to offer marriage to her ward, Miss Snow. He explains that he has met Miss Snow thanks to "my intimacy with Mrs. Snow", and has come "to admire in her an agreeable person, an affable and engaging behavior, joined to a fine understanding". He goes on to declare that these are charms too prevailing to pass without observation. Me, I own, they have fixed amongst the number of her most passionate admirers, and I have considered "em so attentively that to be possessed of the lady who is mistress of such admirable and valuable qualifications is (however undeserving I may be of such an inestimable treasure) become necessary to my happiness. I should have subjected myself to the charge of acting improperly...had I paid my addresses to Miss Snow, ...and her own prudence and good sense would have blamed me for offering to do it without your knowledge and approbation. You have been, and still are, to her in the place of a parent Knowing this, I should be unpardonable if I was to take any step toward the accomplishment of my hopes previous to that of having your sentiment upon the matter.
(3) After this long-winded preamble, the Revd Knowles frankly conceded that he was not much of a financial catch. He had no private income, he lived entirely upon his two church livings, which brought in ￡120 a year, and he was still paying off debts owed by his late father. He stressed that his intention "is not to lay my force upon the lady"s inclinations, for I honestly declare to you I wouldn"t marry the best woman in the three kingdoms unless I was as certain of her affections as I was of her hand". He winds up with the request: "Remember, dear madam, that the happiness of a man...is at present in your hands."
(4) What is noticeable about this letter is, first, that in polite society in the mid-eighteenth century it was still expected that a would-be suitor should first request, in the most stilted and formal manner, the permission of the guardian; second, that the motives for the suit should be entirely based upon mutual affection—but with no hint of either romantic love or sexual passion; and third, that although there was a frank recognition that a difference in financial circumstances might raise an obstacle to the match, the suitor did not regard it as an insuperable one. We are already moving away from the world of Defoe, and even Fielding, and into the more ambiguous one of Jane Austen.
(5) Occasionally, of course, and increasingly throughout the eighteenth century, unsupervised couples from propertied families would meet at court, or at Bath, or on the hunting-field, and conduct their own courtship in complete secrecy. Sooner or later, however, they were obliged to face up to the necessity of obtaining consent of parents or friends. Negotiations and haggling over the settlement now became the last step instead of the first, as the father of the bride decided upon the size of the marriage portion, and the father of the groom upon the appropriate current maintenance for the couple, as well as the jointure for the bride if she outlived the groom.
(6) In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pressure of parents, friends, and kin in the highest circles of society was all but irresistible, especially because of the financial pressures which could be, arid often were, brought to bear. By the eighteenth century, however, the concept of affective individualism had penetrated even these elevated circles, and thanks to the romantic movement, by the end of the century the tables had been entirely turned. By then, even in great aristocratic households, mutual affection was regarded as the essential prerequisite for matrimony, even if sometimes this led to disappointing results. Thus, in 1796, the parents and lawyers arranged the financial details of a match between the heir to the Duke of Leeds and a great heiress, Lady Gertrude Villiers. Once all this was satisfactorily settled, the couple were sent off to the seaside together to get to know each other. The result was not a success, and it was reported that the match was "entirely off, after an ineffectual attempt to fall in love with each other at Weymouth and which was rather an awkward business for both". By this time, at the end of the eighteenth century, we have entered a new world in which, even in a social group for whom large estates and ancient titles were the stakes in the game, the complex calculations of scheming parents and artful lawyers took second place—and willingly so—to the dictates of the heart. Other elite couples were inspired to marry by more carnal ambitions. Few spelt it out more frankly than Frederick Mullins in 1747, when he complained that the trustees of his marriage settlement were unnecessarily delaying "my taking possession of the charming Phoebe", adding by way of explanation that they were "not so eager for a f—k as I am".
(7) Below this level, among the propertied middling sort, arrangements were much more fluid, and depended to a considerable degree upon the personal characters of parents and children. Some parents were as authoritarian as dukes, others adopted a policy of affectionate and tolerant laissez-faire . What is clear, however, is that in general in this middling social class, English women as well as men enjoyed what was by European standards a quite exceptional freedom to select their own spouses and to conduct their own courtship rituals. The rituals included the usual meetings, talks, exchanges of presents, expressions of love and affection, and discussion of economic prospects. They tended to be prolonged, rarely lasting less than four months and sometimes continuing for one or two years.
PASSAGE THREE
(1) Any serious educational theory must consist of two parts: a conception of the ends of life, and a science of psychological dynamics, i.e. of the laws of mental change. Two men who differ as to the ends of life cannot hope to agree about education. The educational machine, throughout Western civilization, is dominated by two ethical theories: that of Christianity, and that of nationalism. These two, when taken seriously, are incompatible, as is becoming evident in Germany. For my part, I hold that, where they differ, Christianity is preferable, but where they agree, both are mistaken. The conception on which I should substitute as the purpose of education is civilization, a term which, as I mean it, has a definition which is partly individual, partly social. It consists, in the individual, of both intellectual and moral qualities: intellectually, a certain minimum of general knowledge, technical skill in one"s own profession, and a habit of forming opinions on evidence; morally, of impartiality, kindliness, and a modicum of self-control. I should add a quality which is neither moral nor intellectual, but perhaps physiological: zest and joy of life . In communities, civilization demands respect for law, justice as between man and man, purposes not involving permanent injury to any section of the human race, and intelligent adaptation of means to ends.
(2) If these are to be the purpose of education, it is a question for the science of psychology to consider what can be done towards realizing them, and, in particular, what degree of freedom is likely to prove most effective.
(3) On the question of freedom in education there are at present three main schools of thought, deriving partly from differences as to ends and partly from differences in psychological theory. There are those who say that children should be completely free, however bad they may be; there are those who say they should be completely subject to authority, however good they may be; and there are those who say they should be free, but in spite of freedom they should be always good. This last party is larger than it has any logical right to be; children, like adults, will not all be virtuous if they are all free. The belief that liberty will ensure moral perfection is a relic of Rousseauism, and would not survive a study of animals and babies. Those who hold this belief think that education should have no positive purpose, but should merely offer an environment suitable for spontaneous development. I cannot agree with this school, which seems to me too individualistic, and unduly indifferent to the importance of knowledge. We live in communities which require co-operation, and it would be utopian to expect all the necessary co-operation to result from spontaneous impulse. The existence of a large population on a limited area is only possible owing to science and technique; education must, therefore, hand on the necessary minimum of these. The educators who allow most freedom are men whose success depends upon a degree of benevolence, self-control, and trained intelligence which can hardly be generated where every impulse is left unchecked; their merits, therefore, are not likely to be perpetuated if their methods are undiluted. Education, viewed from a social standpoint, must be something more positive than a mere opportunity for growth. It must, of course, provide this, but it must also provide a mental and moral equipment which children cannot acquire entirely for themselves.
(4) The arguments in favor of a great degree of freedom in education are derived not from man"s natural goodness, but from the effects of authority, both on those who suffer it and on those who exercise it. Those who are subject to authority become either submissive or rebellious, and each attitude has its drawbacks.
(5) The submissive lose initiative, both in thought and action; moreover, the anger generated by the feeling of being thwarted tends to find an outlet in bullying those who are weaker. That is why tyrannical institutions are self-perpetuating: what a man has suffered from his father he inflicts upon his son, and the humiliations which he remembers having endured at his public school he passes on to "natives" when he becomes an empire-builder. Thus an unduly authoritative education turns the pupils into timid tyrants, incapable of either claiming or tolerating originality in word or deed. The effect upon the educators is even worse: they tend to become sadistic disciplinarians, glad to inspire terror, and content to inspire nothing else. As these men represent knowledge, the pupils acquire a horror of knowledge, which, among the English upper-class, is supposed to be part of human nature, but is really part of the well-grounded hatred of the authoritarian pedagogue.
(6) Rebels, on the other hand, though they may be necessary, can hardly be just to what exists. Moreover, there are many ways of rebelling, and only a small minority of these are wise. Galileo was a rebel and was wise; believers in the fiat-earth theory are equally rebels, but are foolish. There is a great danger in the tendency to suppose that opposition to authority is essentially meritorious and that unconventional opinions are bound to be correct: no useful purpose is served by smashing lamp-posts or maintaining Shakespeare to be no poet. Yet this excessive rebelliousness is often the effect that too much authority has on spirited pupils. And when rebels become educators, they sometimes encourage defiance in their pupils, for whom at the same time they are trying to produce a perfect environment, although these two aims are scarcely compatible.
(7) What is wanted is neither submissiveness nor rebellion, but good nature, and general friendliness both to people and to new ideas. These qualities are due in part to physical causes, to which old-fashioned educators paid too little attention; but they are due still more to freedom from the feeling of baffled impotence which arises when vital impulses are thwarted. If the young are to grow into friendly adults, it is necessary, in most cases, that they should feel their environment friendly. This requires that there should be a certain sympathy with the child"s important desires, and not merely an attempt to use him for some abstract end such as the glory of God or the greatness of one"s country. And, in teaching, every attempt should be made to cause the pupil to feel that it is worth his while to know what is being taught—at least when this is true. When the pupil co-operates willingly, he learns twice as fast and with half the fatigue. All these are valid reasons for a very great degree of freedom.What"s the post-family order as you can foresee (PASSAGE ONE)