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下面为大家整理的是一篇关于accidental-death 的SAT文章阅读模拟题，后面附有相关题目和正确答案。SAT文章阅读考试涉及到的类别很多，需要大家很多的练习。下面大家就和小编一起来看看详细内容吧。 In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $750,000. The transformation in social values implicit in juxta- posing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana Zelizers excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the useful child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the useless child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally priceless. Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800s, this new view of childhood spread through- out society in the iate-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the assumption that a childs emotional value made child labor taboo.For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of childrens productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment of childrens worth. Yet expulsion of children from the cash nexus,... although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures, Zelizer maintains. was also part of a cultural process of sacral- ization of childrens lives.Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.In stressing the cultural determinants of a childs worth. Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new sociological economics, who have analyzed such tradi- tionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, educa- tion, and health solely in terms of their economic deter- minants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual preferences, these sociologists tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their exchange orsur- render value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater. | 
