TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2002)(18)

TEST FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (2002)

四.阅读理解

A

PART VI READING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)

SECTION A

In this section there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.

TEXT A

Many of the home electric goods which are advertised as liberating the modern woman tend to have the opposite effect, because they simple change the nature of work instead of eliminating it. Machines have a certain novelty value, like toys for adults. It is certainly less tiring to put clothes in a washing machine, but the time saved does not really amount to much: the machine has to be watched, the clothes have to be carefully sorted out first, stains removed by hand, buttons pushed and water changed, clothes taken out, aired and ironed. It would be more liberating to pack it all off to a laundry and not necessarily more expensive, since no capital investment is required. Similarly, if you really want to save time you do not make cakes with an electric mixer, you buy one in a shop. Ifone compares the image of the woman in the women's magazine with the goods advertised by those periodicals; one realizes how useful a projected image can be commercially. A careful balance has to be struck: if you show a labour-saving device, follow it up with a complicated' recipe on the next page; on no account hint at the notion that a woman could get herself a job, but instead foster her sense of her own usefulness, emphasizing the creative aspect of her function as a housewife. So we get cake mixes where the cook simply adds an egg herself, to produce "that lovely homo-baked flavour the family love", and knitting patterns that can be made by hand, or worse still, on knitting machines, which became tremendously fashionable when they were first introduced. Automatic cookers are advertised by pictures of pretty young mothers taking their children to the park, not by professional women presetting the dinner before leaving home for work.

66. According to the passage, many of the home electric goods which are supposed to liberate woman ________.

A. remove unpleasant aspects of housework

B. save the housewife very little time

C. save the housewife's time but not her money

D. have absolutely no value for the housewife

67. According to the context, "capital investment" refers to money ________. READING COMPREHENSION (25 MIN)