What would be your thesis statement? What would be your main points and support? Develop a persuasive presentation to refute his opinion and make the class accept your ideas.
VIII. Translation
A. Translate the following sentences into English.
1. 人们认为年轻人最好在事业有成之后再结婚，过安定的生活。(desirable, settle down, established)
2. 她的丈夫是个非常顾家的人，每天都花很多时间做饭、打扫卫生、照顾三个正在上学的 孩子。(domestic)
3. 现在的年轻人具有与他们的父母截然不同的价值观和期望，他们认为个人享乐比家庭责 任更重要。(values, give priority to)
4. 从社会角度看，妇女一辈子当全职家庭主妇是不明智的，更不要说受过良好教育的妇女 了。(make sense, much less)
5. 二十几岁的单身男女认为同居是婚前考察未来伴侣品质、习惯的途径。可是婚前同居已 证明与较高的离婚风险相关联。(cohabitation)
6. 为了儿童的福利，政府应该制定政策，为父母提供兼职、临时和弹性工作时间的工作机 会以及带薪育儿假。(in the interest of)
7. 着眼于建立牢固持久的婚姻关系，夫妻在发生摩擦时应该相互体谅。(with an eye toward, make allowances for)
8. 考虑到离婚率很高，已婚母亲如果长期脱离劳动力市场就将自担风险 —— 一旦她们的 婚姻以离婚告终，她们将遭受严重的经济损失。(given, at one’s peril)
9. 父母与子女之间的关系是一种非常特殊的关系。父母为子女所做出的牺牲是无法用金钱 补偿的。(bond, make up for)
10. 劳动人口中男女平等日益增强为女性在事业上实现自己的抱负提供了史无前例的机遇。 （historically unprecedented, personal fulfillment）
B. Translate the following selected paragraphs into Chinese.
Male breadwinning and female childrearing have been the pattern of social life throughout history, albeit not always in quite so extreme a form as found in modern societies over the past century and a half. Except perhaps for adult pair-bonds in which no young children are involved, where much social experimentation is possible, it is foolhardy to think that the nuclear family can or should be entirely scrapped. When children become a part of the equation, fundamental biological and social constraints come into play — such as the importance of mothers to young children — and central elements of the nuclear family are dismissed at society’s peril. Rather than strive for androgyny and be continuously frustrated and unsettled by our lack of achievement of it, we would do much better to more readily acknowledge, accommodate, and appreciate
the very different needs, sexual interests, values, and goals of each sex. And rather than the unisex pursuit of “freedom with a male bias,” we should be doing more to foster a culture in which the traditional female values of relationship and caring are given a higher priority and respect. (Para. 13)
In a much modified form, then, traditional marital gender roles are necessary if the 102
新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 good of society — and of individuals — are to be advanced. (Para. 14)
IX. Writing
In the text, David Popenoe puts forward seven tenets for establishing new marital
norms that he believes will promote the benefit of society and of individuals. Select any one of them and write an essay of about 250 words to explain whether you agree or disagree with Popenoe’s position. Don’t forget to give a title to your essay.
Cohabitation Instead of Marriage?
by James Q. Wilson
James Q. Wilson is the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University and the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books, including Moral Judgment, Moral Sense, American Government, Bureaucracy, Thinking About Crime, Varieties of Police Behavior, Political Organizations, and Crime and Human Nature (co-authored with Richard J. Herrnstein). This selection is from his 2002 book, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families.
If marriage is designed to help solve a society’s need to maintain family, and if modern societies such as ours have created ways of raising children that are independent of family life, then family life ought not to be very important. If a child can be raised by a nanny（保姆）or a day-care center（日间托儿
所）, if its education can be left in the hands of public and private schools, if
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Unit Five Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
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its physical well-being can be entrusted（托付）to police officers and social workers（社会福利工作者）, then marriage does not offer much to the father and mother. And if the couple has no wish for children, then marriage offers nothing at all. Perhaps men and women can simply decide to live together — to cohabit（同居）— without any formalities（正式手续）that define a “legal” marriage.
But cohabitation creates a problem that most people will find hard to solve. If people are free to leave cohabitation (and they must be, or it would be called a marriage instead), then in many cases, neither the man nor the woman has any strong incentive（激励）to invest heavily in the union. Marriage is a way of making such investments plausible（有道理的）by telling each party that they are united forever, and if they wish to dissolve（解除）this union that they will have to go through an elaborate（复杂的）and possibly costly legal ritual （程序）called divorce. Marriage is a way of restricting the freedom of people so that investing emotionally and financially in the union makes sense. I can join my money with yours because, should we ever wish to separate, we would have to go through a difficult process of settling our accounts. That process, divorce, makes merged（合并的）accounts less risky. If a cohabiting couple has a child, its custody（监护）can be decided by one parent taking it. If we marry,
however, the custody of the child will be determined by a judge, and so each of our interests in its custody will get official recognition. This fact makes it easier for us to have a child.
And love itself is helped by marriage. If we cohabit and I stop loving you, I walk away. This means that you have less of an incentive to love me, since your affection may not be returned by me for as long as you would like and hence your love might be wasted. But if we promise to live together forevermore（永 远）(even though we know that we can get a divorce if we are willing to put up with its costs), each of us is saying that since you have promised to love me, I can afford to love you.
Cohabiting couples in the United States tend to keep separate bank
accounts and divide up the expenses of their life together. And this financial practice signals a potential social burden. While married couples with unequal incomes are less likely to get a divorce than those with more equal ones, cohabiting ones with unequal incomes are likely to split apart. If our money is kept in separate accounts, then your having more (or less) money than I makes a difference. If it is kept in merged accounts, then nobody observes differences in income.
Cohabitation ordinarily does not last very long; most such unions in America break up (sometimes with a split, sometimes with a marriage) within two years. Scholars increasingly regard cohabitation as a substitute to being single, not an alternative to marriage. And a good thing, since people seem to bring different expectations to the former than to the latter. When high-school seniors（高中毕业班学生）were followed into their early thirties, women who highly valued having a career and men who greatly valued leisure were more likely to cohabit than were people with the opposite views. Women seemed to think that cohabitation helps their careers, men to think it helps them spend
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新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 more time with “the boys1.” Neither view makes much sense, since cohabitation not only does not last very long, most people think cohabiting couples are doing something odd. Like it or not, the couple living together will discover in countless ways that society thinks they should either get married or split apart. And society’s opinion makes sense. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher2 put it, … marriage makes you better off, because marriage makes you very important to someone. When you are married you know that someone else not only loves you, but needs you and depends on you. This makes marriage a contract like no other.
Until recently, cultures set rules for marriage that were not only designed to protect the child but to achieve a variety of other goals as well. A family was a political, economic, and educational unit as well as a childrearing one. It participated in deciding who would rule the community and (except in wandering hunter-gatherer（采集者）groups) control or have privileged access to land that supplied food and cattle. Until the modern advent（出现）of schools, families educated their children, not with books, but by demonstrating how to care for other children, perform certain crafts, and mind cattle and
agricultural fields. These demonstrations sometimes took the form of games and sometimes depended simply on show-and-tell（示范）, but a child’s life in either event was governed by the need to demonstrate, year by year, that it had learned how to watch, carry, feed, hunt, fish, and build. These tutorial, educational, and economic families were linked together in kinship（亲属关系） groupings（小团体）that constituted the whole of the small society — often no more than two hundred people, and sometimes even fewer — that lived together in a settlement（定居点）.
These social functions did not prevent married men and women from caring for each other, even in arranged marriages（包办婚姻）. Affection
existed, though of course it was sometimes interrupted by quarrels and beatings. This affection and the companionship it entailed（需要）were valuable
supports to family life, but they were not until recently the chief, much less the sole, grounds for maintaining the union.
Today, the family has lost many of these functions. Politically, the family has been replaced by the voting booth3 and the interest group4, economically by the office and the factory, and educationally by the school and the Internet. Modernity（现代状态）did not simply produce these changes: Capitalism（资 本主义）did not change the family (the family first changed in ways that made capitalism possible), and schools did not make families less relevant (families changed in ways that made schools more valuable). In later chapters we shall
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1 the boys: <口>（尤指有共同兴趣的）一群男人
2 Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher: 美国芝加哥大学的社会学教授琳达·维特和保守派专栏作家玛吉·加拉赫，她们合 作撰写了《婚姻案例》（The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially）一书。 3 voting booth: 投票间（投票站供选民写选票的半封闭隔间） 4 interest group: 利益集团（指因共同利益而结合在一起的一批人）
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Unit Five Seven Tenets for Establishing New Marital Norms
see how these complex alterations（改变） occurred.
But for now it is important to observe that the family now rests almost
entirely on affection and child care. These are powerful forces, but the history of the family suggests that almost every culture has found them to be inadequate to producing child support. If we ask why the family is, for many people, a weaker institution（风俗习惯，制度）today than it once was, it is pointless to look for the answer in recent events. Our desire for sexual unions and romantic attachments（依恋，爱慕）is as old as humankind, and they will continue forever. But our ability to fashion（制作，塑造）a marriage that will make the union last even longer than the romance that inspired it depends on cultural, religious, and legal doctrines（教条，信条）that have slowly changed. Today people may be facing a challenge for which they are utterly unprepared: a vast, urban world of personal freedom, bureaucratized（已成为政府机构的）services, cheap sex, and easy divorce.
Marriage is a socially arranged solution for the problem of getting people to
stay together and care for children that the mere desire for children, and the sex that makes children possible, does not solve. The problem of marriage today is that we imagine that its benefits have been offset by social arrangements, such as welfare payments, community tolerance, and professional help for children, that make marriage unnecessary. But as we have already seen, the advantages of marriage — personal health, longer lives, and better children — remain great. The advantages of cohabitation are mostly illusory（虚幻的）, but it is an illusion（错误的观点，幻想） that is growing in its appeal.
Reading Comprehension
Choose the best answer to each of the following questions.
1. Why do many people believe that it is all right for men and women to simply cohabit without a legal marriage?
A. Because they think social organizations can replace families to raise and educate children.
B. Because they think the legal procedure of getting a divorce is too complicated and expensive.
C. Because they think higher income earners will suffer economic loss if they marry and then divorce.
D. Because they think cohabiting couples are free to end their relationship when their love fades away.
2. In paragraphs 2, 3 and 4, the author compares cohabitation with marriage. To him, what is the advantage of marriage over cohabitation? A. Marriage strengthens the emotional bond between the couple. B. Marriage reduces the risk the couple takes to join their money. C. Marriage removes the worry the couple has about having a child. D. All of the above.
3. In paragraph 5, the author says most cohabitation breaks up within two years. In his opinion, why does not cohabitation ordinarily last very long?
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新视角研究生英语 读说写 2 A. Because cohabiting women are too dedicated to their pursuit of career. B. Because cohabiting men spend too much time on their pursuit of leisure. C. Because cohabiting couples have changing expectations about each other. D. Because cohabiting couples are under social pressure to end cohabitation. 4. In paragraphs 6 to 9, the author compares the family of the past and of today, and concludes that the family is “a weaker institution today than it once was.” What traditional basis has today’s family lost? And what basis does it depend on only?
A. Political function ? Economic, educational and childrearing function plus affection.
B. Political and economic function ? Educational and childrearing function plus affection.
C. Political, economic and educational function ? Childrearing function and affection.
D. Political, economic, educational and childrearing function ? Affection. 5. Finally, the author argues that marriage is still necessary in today’s modern society. What is the main reason for it?
A. Human beings’ desire for sexual unions and romantic attachments will continue forever.
B. The cultural, religious and legal beliefs that people are living with have slowly changed.
C. Marriage is a social arrangement to get people to stay together and care for children.
D. Advantages of marriage have been offset by social arrangements and are mostly illusory.