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  3. A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadw

A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadw

admin2015-03-25  31
问题     A working mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadwinning fathers are unlikely to provoke moral panic, the public’s interest in how working women raise their children is easily provoked. One of Britain’s biggest-selling newspapers proclaimed fearfully on Friday: "Three in four middle-class mothers continue to work after having a baby, a study shows... The figures point to a relentless rise in the number of working mothers of very young children. "
    Conducted by researchers at University College London, it surveyed 19,000 British households to determine how parental employment affects a child’s behaviour throughout the first five years of life.
    The results will startle those who think that children benefit from having a stay-at-home mum. In fact, the paper indicates that maternal employment can often improve the chances of having well-adjusted kids. For example, five-year-olds whose mothers had been at home when they were babies were more likely to have behavioural problems than other children. For each child, the longer the time their mother was off work, the more annoying bratty was the child’s behaviour.
    Of course, life can rarely be boiled down to simple equations of cause and effect. What complicates this picture is the correlation between work patterns and other factors like lower household income, poorer education and depression, which might affect whether a woman chooses to go to work. Interestingly, when the study adjusted for these factors, the relationship between bad behaviour and maternal unemployment remained strong for girls but not for boys. This may reflect, the authors said, "the importance of gender in family role model processes"— the inference being that girls benefit from having a mother as an exemplar of a woman who is successful and independent, while the effect is less pronounced for boys.
    The paper also looked at the working arrangements of all adults in the household. Once again, the trends differed by sex. Boys, but not girls, were likely to suffer from their mother being the sole breadwinner, although once the results were adjusted for income, education and depression, the detrimental impact on boys disappeared. Boys thrived equally in homes where both parents were working, and in two-parent "traditional" families in which their mothers stayed at home. Girls, in contrast, appeared to have significantly fewer problems where both parents were employed than in traditional homes.
    The study also has its limitations. It restricted its analysis to white children because of problems with sampling other ethnicities. Statistically, that is not a huge drawback; 92% of Britons identified themselves as white in the 2001 census. A bigger issue is the way the data were collected, involving questionnaires about children’s behaviour, almost always answered by mothers. Working mums know that they are vulnerable to criticism from certain sections of society and the media; when surveyed, this might incline them to paint defensively rosy portraits of their children, and so to skew the results.
According to the passage, public attention
选项 A、has focused excessively on working fathers.
B、has aroused working mothers’ anger and panic.
C、is always keeping a critical eye on working mothers.
D、guides the way people look at working mothers.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。根据题干关键词public attention定位到第一段第二句：一天到晚为了养家而忙忙碌碌的父亲们不太可能激起道德恐慌，但是公众对职业母亲养儿育女的方式的兴趣却极易引起道德恐慌。由此可见，公众总是对职业母亲持批评态度，[C]与原文意思相符，故为答案。而[A]与原文意思相反，故排除；原文没有提到公众的注意力引导人们看待女性工作的问题，因此排除[D]。
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