下面为大家整理的是一篇关于working class in the US的SAT文章阅读模拟题,后面附有相关题目。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。 Since the early 1970s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930s. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book.Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massa-chusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas. The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depres- sion standards: during the worst years, in the 1870s and 1890s, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequenciesmeasuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger. Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unem-ployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historiansthe startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assis- tance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells. |