1. The word stereotype came into English from ______ in the early 19th century.
A.French
B.America
C.Singapore
D.Brazil
A B C D
A
[解析] “stereotype”这个词是19世纪早期从法国传到英国的。
2. About ______ of Americans own a gun.
A.15%
B.20%
C.25%
D.30%
A B C D
C
[解析] 美国有25%的人拥有枪支。
3. In the late ______ the refusal of Republican Party leaders to include provisions explicitly protecting women in the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution led to the founding of an independent women's suffrage organization.
8. Which of the following began to use the concept of the assembly line for manufacture, a notion borrowed from the practices of cattle slaughtering houses? ______
A.Frederick Winslow Taylor.
B.Henry Ford.
C.Cyrus H. McCormick.
D.Eli Whitney.
A B C D
B
[解析] 亨利·福特率先使用了装配线进行汽车生产,这一创新来源于屠宰场的操作方法。
9. Who was the most famous of all American inventors and invented electric lamp, phonograph, motion pictures and parallel circuit? ______
1. The term WASP emerged in the ______. It remained dominant until the middle of the 20th century.
1920s
[解析] 术语WASP在20世纪20年代开始出现,直到20世纪中期它都一直占据着主导地位。
2. After ______, the WASPs gradually lost their privileged position.
World War Ⅱ
[解析] 第二次世界大战之后,WASP逐渐失去了他们的特权地位。
3. America as a(n) ______ was understood to be made up of many different components that each retained its characteristic flavor, color and texture.
"salad bowl"
[解析] 比喻成“沙拉碗”可以理解为美国由许多不同的部分组成,每个部分保留其独特风味,颜色和质地。
4. The population of USA is less than a quarter of the population of China, but there is less ______ in the USA than in China, which makes it difficult to generalize about the American way of life.
7. Since the late 1970s and the introduction of ______ divorce laws that are now nearly universal in American states, the divorce rate has been about ______.
13. The first pressure to change the status of women arose from a small meeting called to consider the "social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women" which assembled at the ______ Chapel in Seneca Falls in upstate New York in 1848. The only advertised speaker at the meeting was ______.
14. The birthrate had jumped by the late 1950s, the time of which in America known as the ______.
“baby boom”
[解析] 这个时期的出生率上涨,被称为“婴儿潮”时期。
15. In a landmark book, ______, published in 1963, Betty Friedan called it "The problem without a Name." Thus began the second" wave of the American women's movement.
16. In 1954, in the landmark decision of Brown versus the Board of Education, the Supreme Court banned the ______ of schools.
racial segregation
[解析] 1954年最高法院关于“布朗对教育局”一案的里程碑式的决定禁止学校的种族隔离制度。
17. By the time of the 1980 election of the Republican president, ______, the backlash against feminism was in full swing.
Ronald Reagan
[解析] 到1980年,共和党的里根当选总统时,对女权主义的抵制达到了高潮。
18. Invoking the early chapters of Genesis, such Christians define the feminine role as inferior and therefore tightly subject to male domination model, in short, of what is usually defined as the traditional ______ family.
19. While protected in employment on an equal basis with men, once they are hired, women now often come up against what is known as the "______"—a barrier to promotions within their chosen careers.
20. ______ stoutly defended a document drafted and read at the convention by Stanton.
Frederick Douglass
[解析] 弗雷德里克·道格拉斯坚决捍卫一个由斯坦顿起草并在民主党大会诵读的文件。
21. After the Civil War ended in 1865, the activists for women's rights found their concerns still closely bound up with the abortion of ______.
slavery
[解析] 1865年美国内战结束后,妇女权利活动家发现他们自己仍在担忧奴隶制度的废除问题。
22. During the mid-20th century, Ford ______ line technology made possible availability of the inexpensive automobile, which facilitated the ______—the moving away of the wealthy middle class from dirty and crowded cities to the suburbs.
Eli Whitney (1765—1825) was a US inventor, manufacturer and mechanical engineer who invented the mechanical cotton gin in Georgia in 1793, thus brought revolutionary changes to cotton trade.
2. The Great Depression
The Great Depression started on October 24, 1929 when a wave of panic selling of stocks swept the New York Stock Exchange. By 1932, numerous banks and businesses had failed, and one quarter of all the workers suffered from unemployment.
Ⅴ. Answer the questions
1. What is the meaning of WASP? What values are WASPs associated with?
WASP refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. In WASP, W means white because African Americans, though they began arriving early in the 17th century, were systematically oppressed. AS stands for Anglo-Saxon because all the immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered inferior by definition, and P stands for Protestant. In the Declaration of Dependence it says, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These traditional values fed into the "American Dream" that inspired so many immigrants: hard work with confidence of success, self-reliance paired with trust in God.
2. How do you understand the USA as a "melting pot"?
Starting in the early 17th century, immigrants have flooded into what is now USA. The population continues to become more and more diverse, with Asia and Latin America contributing millions to add to the European and African diasporas of earlier years. A nation of immigrates in fact refers to a process by which early immigrated groups privileged their own kind while looking down on later arrivals. The dominant class came either from England or adopted the values and prejudices of the English. They were anglophilic; that is, they saw themselves as following English upper-class manners and tastes. To track this process in the 20th century, the best place to start is with a metaphor that was adopted by large numbers of Americans as their own serf-definition of the nation. That metaphor is "the melting pot," an association with life in America that first surfaced in late in the 18th century. In the 20th century the new currency of this image dates back to 1905 when a popular play by that name was first produced by a visiting Jewish playwright from England named Israel Zangwill. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestants welcomed the image of the "melting pot" as self-congratulation. They didn't understand the image as implying that, in the New World, all differences would be melted away to form a radically new mixture. Instead the anglophiles presumed that any characteristics that deviated from the WASP norm would melt away. In short, they saw the melting port image as confirming their own dominance.
3. What is the significance of The Seneca Falls Declaration?
The Seneca Falls Declaration is now regarded as the single most important document of the nine-teenth-century American women's movement. It marks the first call for systematic rights for women along the lines of those already available to the white men. Its terms called for nothing less than a programmatic change in the laws applying to women and, as such, laid out the agenda for all succeeding agitation on the part of women's rights for the next century.
4. What are the two important principles in the second wave of the American women's movement?
First, American society operates through a kind of organized conflict, both in terms of its institutions and its evolutions of ideology. As a democracy, it believes that change comes about through a kind of open market of ideas, a competition in which the best arguments will inevitably prevail. Partly for this reason, American society did not shy away from the war of conflicting ideologies that ushered in the feminist revolution. Secondly, American society is committed to certain founding values as enshrined in the US Constitution. These are crystallized in the words "equality" and "liberty". If anyone feels that their equality or freedom has been infringed, they may take a legal case invoking these concepts as set out in the laws governing the land. Such a case, if deemed valid, would work its way up through the State to the Federal courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court, which delivers a final and authoritative opinion according to its interpretation of the Constitution.
5. What is now in the women's liberation movement in America? What do you know about it?
Now refers to National Organization for Women in the women's liberation movement in America. While the membership of it was mostly white, married, and middle class, a younger and far more radical sector of women created small " consciousness-raising" groups in every community in which they were active. These groups sought to bind women together in a new ideological vision of how their lives could be remade outside of traditional gender roles. Many of these young women, also the product of white, middle-class homes, had been active in organizing civil rights campaigns in the South. As they were notably more radical than their sisters in NOW, there were often arguments about tactics and goals. But, as we have seen, such arguments are the engine of social change in America. Thus, between them, these different branches of the women's movement helped to bring about massive change in attitudes toward the role of women in American society.