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  3. If Shakira, a Colombian pop star, marries her boyfriend, the Spanish national footballer Gerard Pique, the only unusual things a

If Shakira, a Colombian pop star, marries her boyfriend, the Spanish national footballer Gerard Pique, the only unusual things a

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问题     If Shakira, a Colombian pop star, marries her boyfriend, the Spanish national footballer Gerard Pique, the only unusual things about it would be that she is even more famous than he is and ten years older. Otherwise, theirs would be just a celebrity example of one of the world’s biggest social trends: the rise of international marriages—that is, involving couples of different nationalities.
    A hundred years ago, such alliances were confined to the elite of the elite. When Randolph Churchill married Jennie Jerome of New York, it seemed as if they had stepped from the pages of a Henry James novel; brash, spirited American heiress peps up the declining fortunes of Britain’s aristocracy. Now, such alliances have become almost commonplace. To confine examples to politicians only: the French President Nicolas Sarkozy is married to the Italian-born Carla Bruni and his Prime Minister Francois Fillon has a Welsh wife, Penelope Clarke. Nelson Mandela is married to Graga Machel (from Mozambique). Denmark’s new Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Briton, Stephen Kinnock. And two leading female politicians of Asian countries, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and India’s Sonia Gandhi, are both widows from international marriages. In rich countries alone such unions number at least 10 million.
    International marriages matter partly because they reflect—and result from—globalisation. As people holiday or study abroad, or migrate to live and work, the visitors meet and marry locals. Their unions are symbols of cultural integration, and battlefields for conflicts over integration. Few things help immigrants come to terms with their new country more than becoming part of a local family. Though the offspring of such unions may struggle with the barriers of prejudice, at their best international marriages reduce intolerance directly themselves, and indirectly through their offspring.
    Defining what counts as international is tricky too. A wedding of a local man and a foreign-born bride is easy. But the marriage of two foreigners in a third country sometimes counts and sometimes doesn’t. Trickiest of all is how to treat the marriage of a second-generation immigrant who has citizenship of a host country (say, the child of a Moroccan in France or a Mexican in America). If such a person marries a native Frenchwoman or an American, that usually does not count as international, even though it is an alliance across ethnic lines. Conversely, if he marries a girl from his parents’ country of origin, that does count as international—but this is not a marriage across an ethnic divide and may indicate isolation not assimilation.
    Belatedly, answers to these questions of scale and definition are coming, chiefly thanks to the efforts of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), a professional association of demographers, and, especially, of Doo-Sub Kim, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul who chairs its panel on cross-border marriages. Global figures remain sketchy, but marriage patterns in Asia and Europe, at least, are becoming clearer. Some tentative, often surprising, conclusions are emerging.
    Asia is the part of the world where cross-border marriages have been rising most consistently. According to Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore, 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-2009 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands). Before 1980, the share had been below 1%. In South Korea, over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. In both countries, the share of cross-border marriages seems to have stabilised lately, perhaps as a result of the global economic slowdown. International marriages have played a significant role in modifying the ethnic homogeneity of East Asian countries.
    International marriages are common in much of Europe, too. Calculations by Giampaolo Lanzieri, an Italian demographer, show that in France the proportion of international marriage rose from about 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2009. In Germany, the rise is a little lower, from 11.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2010. Some smaller countries have much higher levels. Nearly half the marriages in Switzerland are international ones, up from a third in 1990. Around one in five marriages in Sweden, Belgium and Austria involves a foreign partner.  
The author would NOT agree that________.
选项 A、international marriages have been an important social trend for a century
B、the study of international marriages has not been given enough attention
C、not all international marriages are helpful for integration of different cultures
D、there may be a correlation between the rise of international marriages and global economic growth
答案A
解析 态度题。第一段末句指出，国际婚姻的兴起是当今全球最重要的社会趋势之一，可见，这一趋势在以往并不普遍；第二段首句指出一百年前国际婚姻仅限于“精英中的精英”，显然当时的国际婚姻与社会大众无关，并非有重大影响力的社会趋势，可见，作者不会赞同[A]的观点：“一个世纪以来，国际婚姻一直是一种重要的社会趋势”，故答案为[A]。第五段第二句指出目前对国际婚姻的研究尚处于初级阶段，很多数据比较粗略，“belatedly”则暗示相关研究未能及时反映国际婚姻日益普遍的趋势，故[B]符合作者观点；第四段末句指出某些婚姻虽可算作国际婚姻，却可能意味着与本地的隔阂，而非同化，故[C]符合作者观点；第六段中作者推测日、韩跨国婚姻所占比例均趋于稳定，可能是全球经济增长趋缓造成的，因此[D]也符合作者的观点。
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