Poverty exists because our society is an unequal one ,and there are extremely strong and powerful political pressures to keep i

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问题    Poverty exists because our society is an unequal one ,and there are extremely strong and powerful political  pressures to keep it that way. Any attempt to redistribute wealth and income in the United States will inevitably be opposed by powerful middle and upper class interests. People can be relatively rich only if others are relatively poor, and since power is concentrated in the hands of the rich, public policies will continue to reflect their interests rather than those of the poor.
   As Herbert Gans (1973) has pointed out, poverty is actually functional from the point of view of the non-poor. Poverty ensures that" dirty" work gets done. If there were, no poor people to scrub floors and empty waste, these jobs would have to be rewarded with high incomes before anyone would touch them. Poverty creates jobs for many of the non-poor, such as police officers, welfare workers, pawnbrokers, and government bureaucrats. Poverty makes life easier for the rich by providing them with cooks, gardeners, and other workers  to perform basic chores while their employers enjoy more, pleasurable activities. Poverty provides a market for inferior goods and services, such as day-old bread, run-down automobiles, or the advice of incompetent physicians and lawyers. Poverty makes middle-class values seem acceptable. To the middle class, the fate of the poor — who are supposed to lack the virtues of thrift, honesty, and a taste for hard work — only confirms the desirability of qualities the poor are thought to lack. Poverty also provides a group that can be made to absorb the costs of change. For example, the poor suffer the main part or force of unemployment caused by automaton, and it is their homes, not those of the wealthy, that are demolished when a route has to be found for a new highway. There is no intentional, conscious "secret plan" of the wealthy to keep the poor in poverty. It is just that poverty is an inevitable outcome of the American economic system; which the poor are politically powerless to influence change.
The best title for the text would be______.

选项 A、An Unequal Society
B、Political Factors in Poverty
C、The Fate of the Poor
D、Functions of Poverty

答案B

解析 本题考查文章的主旨,文章主要讲述了贫穷之所以存在是因为我们的社会是一个不公平的社会,并且存在着强大的政治力量维持着这种不公平的状况,因此选[B]贫困中的政治因素。[A]不平等的社会,太笼统;[C]穷人们的命运,本文在揭示导致穷人们贫穷的命运的根本原因,而不是叙述穷人的命运;作者用讽刺的口吻描述了贫困给富人带来的种种好处,故排除[D]。
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