Far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counti

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问题    Far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35% in 2005 to just 26% now. Yet nearly 10m fewer women are in jobs. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU has of either gender, and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia.
   Imagine the repercussions. Were India to rebalance its workforce in this way, the IMF estimates, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer. Its people would be well on their way to middle-income status. Beyond the obvious economic benefits are the incalculable human ones. Women who work are likelier to invest more in their children’s upbringing, and to have more say over how they lead their lives.
   Social mores are startlingly conservative. A girl’s first task is to persuade her own family that she should have a job. The in-laws she will typically move in with after marriage are even more likely to yank her out of the workforce and into social isolation. In a survey in 2012, 84% of Indians agreed that men have more right to work than women when jobs are scarce. Men have taken 90% of the 36m additional jobs in industry India has created since 2005. And those who say that women themselves prefer not to work must contend with plenty of counter-evidence. Census data suggest that a third of stay-at-home women would work if jobs were available; government make-work schemes attract more women than men.
   What can be done? Many of the standard answers fall short. Promoting education, a time-tested development strategy, may not succeed. Figures show that the more schooling an Indian woman receives, the less likely she is to work, at least if she has anything less than a university degree. Likewise urbanization, another familiar way to alleviate poverty: city-dwelling women are half as likely as rural ones to have a job.
   An optimist might argue that more women are not working because India is still paying for the sins of the past, when so many of them were illiterate and high fertility rates bound them to the home. Most measures of female welfare are improving. India has many more girls in classrooms and fewer child brides than it once did.
   In fact, many fear that all that extra schooling was a parental ploy to improve a daughter’s prospects not in the labour market but in the arranged-marriage market, part of the all-important quest to snag a suitable boy. A further push is needed to get Indian women what they really need: a suitable job.
Once India balanced its workforce again, it would probably bring the following benefits except______.

选项 A、a wealthier India
B、a higher living standard
C、a brighter future for children
D、a heavy investment in education

答案D

解析 事实细节题。根据定位词定位到文章第二段。原文指出,如果印度以这种方式重新平衡劳动力,那么这个世界上最大的民主国家将会富足27%,A项是好处之一;它的人民将会顺利地走在通往中等收入的道路上,B项是好处之一;工作的女性更有可能在孩子的成长过程中投人更多的资金,C项属于合理推断;D项原文未提及,故D项为正确选项。
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