Marriage, and its many ups and downs, still often【C1】______the headlines on newspapers, magazines and the airwaves. Nearly 23m A

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问题     Marriage, and its many ups and downs, still often【C1】______the headlines on newspapers, magazines and the airwaves. Nearly 23m Americans watched Prince William being joined in holy marriage to Kate Middleton. Millions more have【C2】______in the break-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage after revelations that he fathered a son with a maid.
    Less【C3】______are revelations about the sorry state of marriage across the United States. Data from the Census Bureau show that married couples, for the first time, now make up【C4】______than half (45%) of all households.
    The【C5】______American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is【C6】______. In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than【C7】______comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010【C8】______. The latter accounted【C9】______43% of households in 1950, but now just 20%. And the trend has a distinct【C10】______dimension. Traditional marriage has【C11】______from a universal rite to a luxury for the educated and the【C12】______.
    There【C13】______was a marriage gap in 1960: only four percentage points separated the wedded ways of college and high-school graduates (76% versus 72%). The gap has since【C14】______to 16 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Centre. A Census Bureau analysis released this spring found that brides are significantly more【C15】______to have a college degree than they were in the mid-1990s.
    "Marriage has become much more【C16】______, and that’s why the divorce rate has come down," said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The project found that divorce rates for couples with college degrees are only a third as high as for those with a high-school degree.
    "Less marriage means less income and more poverty," reckons Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She and other researchers have【C17】______as much as half of the inequality of wealth 18 in America to changes in family【C19】______: single-parent families (mostly those with a high-school degree or less) are getting poorer while married couples (with educations and dual incomes) are increasingly【C20】______. "This is a striking gap that is not well understood by the public," she says.
【C13】

选项 A、apparently
B、nearly
C、only
D、barely

答案D

解析 根据上文提到的“婚姻率的变化呈现阶级差异”,空格处这句话回顾了美国1960年的情况。其中冒号后面的内容告诉我们:“美国在1960年的时候,大学生和高中生之间在婚姻方面的差异非常小,只有4个百分点的差异。”因此空格处应该填一个词表示“几乎不存在的,非常小的”。因此[D]选项barely正是这个意思。
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