Marriage, and its many ups and downs, still exercises a powerful hold over newspapers, magazines and the airwaves. Nearly 23m Americans watched Prince William being joined in holy marriage to Kate Middleton. Millions more have indulged in the break-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage after revelations that he fathered a son with a maid.
Less delightful 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 less than half of all households.
The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading. In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal ritual to a luxury for the educated and affluent.
There barely 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 widened to 16 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Centre.
"Marriage has become much more selective, 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.
Americans with a high-school degree or less tell researchers they would like to marry, but do not believe they can afford it. Instead, they raise children out of wedlock. Only 6％ of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44％ of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.
"Less marriage means less income and more poverty," reckons Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She and other researchers have linked as much as half of the income inequality in America to changes in family composition: 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 well-off. "This is a striking gap that is not well understood by the public," she says.
Do not expect the Democratic Party, however, to make an issue of the marriage gap in next year’s elections. Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. "You don’t want to suggest to someone who isn’t married and has children that they should be married," says Ms Sawhill. "That is a scorn on their lifestyle.
The first two paragraphs suggest that（）
A. the public like to spy on celebrities’ marriage
B. many celebrities’ marriages are going wrong
C. Americans’ marriage is going downhill
D. people feel sorry for Americans’ marriage
参考答案：C
解析：
[试题类型] 推理引申题。
[解题思路] 根据本题关键词可将本题定位至第一、二段。开篇首先提出“婚姻”大受关注(exercises a powerful hold over newspapers...)，并用威廉王子大婚和施瓦辛格离婚为例说明美国人对婚姻的关注度。接着第二段指出，美国人的婚姻现状让人难过(less delightful, sorry state of marriage)，已婚夫妇的比例已经降到了历史最低(married couples, for the first time，make up less than half of all households)，选项[C]意为“美国人的婚姻正在走下坡路”符合文意，且downhill与文中的sorry、less delightful相呼应，故选项[C]正确。
[干扰排除] 细节服务主旨，首段中的两个例子是首句所陈述现象的例证，作者想表达的观点是：婚姻以及婚姻中的高潮和低谷仍然在报纸、期刊以及电视节目中占据极大的分量。选项[A]“公众喜欢窥探名人婚姻”是对细节的过分引申，并非例证想要说明的内容，故排除该项。首段给出了施瓦辛格婚姻触礁的事例，但并没有提及其他名人婚姻状况不乐观，从文中推断不出选项[B]的内容，故排除。第二段首句提到了less delightful和sorry state of marriage，这是作者的个人感受，并不是公众的普遍看法，选项[D]张冠李戴，应排除。