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.
According to the text, Isabel Sawhill suggests that（）
A. Americans’ marital status affects their social status
B. Americans should take others’ advice on marriage
C. people have no inclination to change others’ lifestyle
D. the impact of marriage on finance hasn’t been realized
参考答案：D
解析：
[试题类型] 推理引申题。
[解题思路] 由题干中的Isabel Sawhill定位至第七段。该段首先说明了Isabel Sawhill的发现：结婚的人减少意味着更贫穷(less marriage means more poverty)，一半的收入不平等与家庭构成的变化相关(half of the income inequality to changes in family composition)。最后一句则指出，她认为人们并未清楚地认识到这种差距，选项[D]是对该句的同义改写，故正确。
[干扰排除] 该段提到的是income, poverty, income inequality这些与家庭财产相关的内容，并未提及社会地位，因此选项[A]属于无中生有，故排除。末段中，Isabel Sawhill指出：你不要建议一个有孩子的未婚人士去结婚，那是对其生活方式的嘲笑。既然她认为人们不应该干涉别人是否应该结婚，因此选项[B]“人们应该接受别人有关婚姻的建议”无从谈起，排除该项。选项[C]是针对末句中lifestyle一词设计的干扰项，属于望文生义，这里没有谈及人们是否有改变别人生活方式的倾向，故排除。