高级视听说教程(第二版)课后答案

Unit1 1. Most countries take a census every ten years or so in order to count the people and to know where they are living. 2. A country with a growing population is a country that is becoming more populous. 3. A person’s race is partly determined by skin color and type of hair as well as other physical characteristics. 4. The majority of the U.S. population is of European origin. 5. The geographical distribution of a country’s population gives information about where the people are living. 6. The total population of the United States is made up of many different kinds of people. 7. In other words, the population comprises people of different races and ages. 8. The average age of the U.S. population, which is a relatively large one, has been getting progressively higher recently. 9. Metropolitan areas are more densely populated than rural areas. That is, they have more people per square mile. 10. The use of antibiotics has greatly decreased the death rate throughout much of the world. 11. A country whose birth rate is higher than its death rate will have an increasing population. 12. On the average, women have a higher life expectancy than men do. Unit2 1.Throughout history, people have moved, or immigrated, to new countries to live. 2.Natural disasters can take many forms:those that are characterized by a shortage of rain or food are called droughts and famines respectively. 3.Sometimes people immigrate to a new country to escape political or religious persecution. 4.Rather than immigrants, the early settlers from Great Britain considered themselves colonists; they had left home to settle new land for the mother country. 5.The So-called Great Immigration, which can be divided into three stages, or time periods, began about l830 and lasted till about 1930. 6.The Industrial Revolution, which began in the eighteenth century, caused widespread unemployment as machines replaced workers. 7.The scarcity of farmland in Europe caused many people to immigrate to the United States, where farmland was more abundant. 8.Land in the United States was plentiful and available when the country was expanding westward. In fact, the U.S. government offered free public land to citizens in 1862. 9.The failure of the Irish potato crop in the middle of the nineteenth century caused widespread starvation. 10.The Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II contributed to the noticeable decrease in immigration after 1930. 11.The first law that limited the number of immigrants coming from a certain part of the world was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 12.It is important to note that in 1965 strict quotas based on nationality were eliminated. 13.At the end of the 1940s immigration began to increase again and has, in general, risen steadily since then. 14.Will the trend continue for non-Europeans to immigrate to the United States? 15.The U.S. immigration laws of today in general require that new immigrants have the skills necessary to succeed in the United States because industry no longer requires large numbers of unskilled workers. Unit 3 1. As we look at the changes over the last century, we’ll use a lot of statistics to describe these changes. 2. While the number of people in these goods producing industries went down, the number of people in the service industries went up. 3. Over the years, child labor laws became much stricter and by 1999, it was illegal for anyone under sixteen to work full-time in any of the fifty States. 4. In 1900 the average per capita income was $4, 200. 5. One of the important benefits most workers received later in the century was health insurance. 6. Whereas wages and salaries rose over the century, the average workweek dropped. 7. People often tend to romanticize the past and talk about “the good old days.” 8. According to a 2003 study released by the United Nations International Labor Organization, U. S. workers are the most productive in the world. 9. Longer working hours in the United States is a rising trend, while the trend in other industrialized countries is the opposite. 10. Workers in some European countries actually outproduce American workers per hour of work. 11. This higher rate of productivity might be because European workers are less stressed than U. S. workers. 12. Between 1949 and 1974, increases in productivity were matched by increases in wages. 13. After 1974, productivity increased in manufacturing and services, but real wages stagnated. 14. The money goes for salaries to CEOs, to the stock market, and to corporate profits. 15. Some people say that labor unions have lost power since the beginning of the 1980s, and that the government has passed laws that favor the rich and weaken the rights of the workers. Unit4 1. A hundred years ago, one heard the same comments about the family that one hears today—in short, that the American family is disintegrating. 2. Proof of this disintegration included evidence that women were not completely content with their domestic role. 3. To the contrary, the very nature of the family has changed drastically in the last fifty years. 4. To be sure, the family is a very sensitive barometer for what is happening in the society. 5. Demographically, the predominant configuration of the family was the traditional one. 6. The country idealized the family in these years:there Was a commitment to the family and a reverence for it. 7. Three characteristics stand out in this period:conformity to social norms, greater male domination of the family, and clear-cut gender roles. 8. These decades were characterized by a lack of conformity to social norms and included the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement. 9. Another important movement was the drive for self-expression and self fulfillment. 10. The new configuration of the family had to include families of cohabiting couples, with or without children. 11. The number of single-parent households tripled, and the number of unmarried couples quadrupled. 12. They see a continuing decline in divorce rates since the 1980s but also a decline in birth rates after an initial increase in the 1980s. 13. There is an attempt to balance work with family obligations, and concern seems to be shifting from individualism to the new familism. 14. Places of work may offer more flexible working hours and on-site day care. 15. For its part, the government could mandate parental leave and family allowances. Unit5 1. The U.S. government cannot ask for information on religious affiliation on a mandatory basis. 2. One survey done in 2002 shows that 76 percent of the total population identified themselves as Christian, with 52 percent identifying themselves as Protestant and 24 percent as Catholic. 3. The number of Americans belonging to churches or other religious organizations is surprisingly high compared to other modernized nations. 4. This is not to suggest that religious values are not important in these other nations. 5. Freedom of worship is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. 6. The First Amendment also establishes the separation of church and state. 7. The importance of religion in American history should not be underestimated. 8. I’d like to talk about the increasing role religion has played in fairly recent history. 9. Religion had seemed to be in decline, but there was a religious revival in the 1970s that surprised many people. 10. The religious revival was conservative in nature and, at first, largely confined to issues in the private sphere of life. 11. These issues, however, were very controversial in nature and became quite politicized in a short time. 2. Perhaps the“rise of the religious right’’is a temporary phenomenon in American life. 13.Some people predict that American society will become increasingly secular and less religious in the future;others predict a more authoritarian political atmosphere based on conservative religious belief. Unit7 1. I understand why a foreigner might react skeptically to U. S. culture, especially if the person comes from a more ethnically and racially homogeneous society. 2. It seems naive or even perverse to deny the existence of a culture that has such great impact on other cultures, for better or worse. 3. A melting pot, literally a pot in which metals like aluminum and copper are melted in order to blend them, is the traditional metaphor for the way the different groups of immigrants came together in the United States. 4. Some people feel that the monoculturalist view of many nationalities blending together into an alloy of all the parts in it is a myth. 5. Opponents point out that many groups have at times been excluded from participating in U.S.society through segregation and discrimination. 6. U. S. society probably did not assimilate new cultural input until the new immigrants were viewed with less prejudice. 7. The metaphor the multiculturalists use is the patchwork quilt, a mosaic of separate, autonomous subcultures. 8. Intermarriage and the adoption of children of another race make a difference in how people in a family look at themselves. 9. The point here is that the ethnically and racially pure individuals implied by the multiculturalist view are more the exception than the rule. 10. We inherit some of our culture from our families and absorb some of our culture unconsciously. 11. If assimilation does not take place in the first generation, it most certainly does by the second or third. 12. Monoculturalists fear a fragmentation, or even destmction, of U. S. culture, whereas proponents of the pluralistic view disagree. 13. It would be wrong to assume that the dominant culture we’ve been speaking about reflects the culture of only one group. 14. Opponents of the pluralistic view of culture cite Latinos, especially Mexican immigrants, the single largest immigrant group since the 1990s.