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  3. During the recession, job losses were not equitably shared; employment rates fell more for some groups than others. It is also w

During the recession, job losses were not equitably shared; employment rates fell more for some groups than others. It is also w

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问题     During the recession, job losses were not equitably shared; employment rates fell more for some groups than others. It is also well known that job losses were greater among men than among women— the so-called mancession—largely because men had been more likely to work in the residential construction and manufacturing industries that were hit hardest.
    What I’m going to reveal is the employment rates separately for married women and unmarried women who were heads of households. Not surprisingly, the latter are somewhat more likely to work. More surprising is that employment rates fell so much more for these unmarried women who were heads of household. Employment per capita fell 4.7 percentage points among the latter, compared with 1.6 percentage points among the former. The job-loss gap associated with marital status turns out to be as large as the more widely recognized job loss gap associated with gender.
    Neither group of women had many members working in construction, so the decline of construction cannot explain these differences. An " added-worker effect" has been observed during a number of recessions; more married women worked during a recession than during an expansion because wives sometimes begin work to help replace the income lost by their unemployed husbands.
    The employment rate among nonelderly married men fell 4 percentage points, to 83 percent from 87 percent. While that is a large decline by historical standards, it still means that roughly 95 percent of wives whose husbands were employed in 2007 had husbands who continued their employment during the recession. Among the 5 percent of wives who were not so fortunate, roughly two-thirds of them had already been working before the recession and therefore could not react to their husband’s unemployment by starting work. Therefore the added-worker effect is much too small to explain the sharply different job-loss rates by marital status.
    What seems to be especially different between married and unmarried women is their propensity to be unemployed for long periods. The point is that married and unmarried women enter unemployment at about the same rate, but unmarried women leave it more slowly. Part of the difference in labor-market experiences has to do with the safety net. Many safety-net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps, and Medicaid, base eligibility on family income. A married woman is usually ineligible for a number of safety-net programs because her family’s income is above the poverty line regardless of her employment status.
    Unmarried household heads, on the other hand, are usually the sole breadwinner for the family, and when their income falls to zero, the household income essentially does, too. For this reason, more unmarried women who are heads of households can expect anti-poverty programs to help them when they are out of work than married women can. An unintended but unavoidable consequence of providing someone a cushion when they are without work is that they are provided with less incentive to get back to work.
It can be inferred from the last two paragraphs that______.
选项 A、the policies made by the government always fail to take most people’s interests into account
B、some generous social welfare programs may exert an unwanted negative effect on the efforts to boost employment rate
C、married people are usually subject to subtle forms of social inequality
D、the government should stop granting unemployment insurance to those unemployed after a certain period of time
答案B
解析 文章最后两段作者主要讨论了造成已婚女性和未婚女性失业率差异的最主要原因——社会福利项目。为数众多的社会保障项目都将家庭收入作为资格标准。因此有配偶的已婚女性被许多社会保障项目拒之门外。而未婚女性因为享有很多的社会福利项目的保障，因此削弱了他们重返职场的愿望。由此判断[A]错误，政府针对社会福利项目设定的一些门槛确实使得未婚女性的利益得到了最大化保障，而已婚女性的利益则在某种程度上受到了忽视。但是我们不能基于这一点就得出结论说政府制定的政策总是无法将大多数人的意愿考虑在内，这属于夸大其词。[B]是正确的，社会福利过于慷慨，会削弱人们工作的意愿，这就是现代社会福利的双刃剑效应。[C]错误，作者自始至终也没有将已婚女性和未婚女性在享受社会福利保障方面出现的差异称为不公现象，因为这种政策的制定本身情有可原，不能称之为社会不公。[D]过度引申，社会福利项目在某种程度上削弱了人们重返职场的愿望，但是政府不能削足适履，因此停止给一段时间之后仍然找不到工作的人发放失业金的说法属于对文章内容的过度引申。
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