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.\
Which of the following would the author most probably agree on().
A.Brides are more likely to have a college degree than they were.
B.Educated men don’t mind marrying women with a high-school degree.
C.Couples don’t end in divorce because both are well-educated.
D.The soaring cost of divorce prevents Americans from divorce.
参考答案：A
解析：
[试题类型] 推理引申题。
[解题思路] 文章第四段提到受教育程度高者和受教育程度低者的婚姻状况：在20世纪60年代，高中毕业生和大学毕业生之间的结婚率差异很小，只相差4%，现在的差距是16%。由此可知，在过去，无论受教育程度如何，大家都选择结婚。而现在，受过大学教育的人选择结婚的更多，且第六段也提到有高中或者高中以下学历的人表示结不起婚(do not believe they can afford it)。因此与过去相比，结婚者更可能拥有大学学历，故选项[A]正确。
[干扰排除] 文章只是提及拥有大学学历者结婚率高，并没有提到男人想找什么学历的结婚对象，选项[B]无依据，故排除。第五段首句指出"Marriage has become much more selective, and that’s why the divorce rate has come down"，然后解释了受教育程度对离婚率的影响。但文中只是说离婚率降低，并没有说受过良好教育的人不会离婚，故选项[C]错误。第五段首句指出婚姻更有选择性，故离婚率下降了(marriage has become much more selective, that’s why the divorce rate has come down)，并没有提到“离婚成本高，所以离婚率下降”，故排除选项[D]。