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1997年1月托福阅读全真试题

时间:2021-09-06 17:00:30 托福英语 我要投稿

1997年1月托福阅读全真试题

Question 1-8

1997年1月托福阅读全真试题

Both the number and the percentage of people in the

United States involved in nonagricultural pursuits expanded

rapidly during the half century following the Civil War, with

some of the most dramatic increases occurring in the domains

of transportation, manufacturing, and trade and distribution.

The development of the railroad and telegraph systems during

the middle third of the nineteenth century led to significant

improvements in the speed, volume, and regularity of shipments

and communications, making possible a fundamental

transformation in the production and distribution of goods.

In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the

emergence of the grain elevators, the cotton presses, the

warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so

many of the nation's farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy

against them. In manufacturing, the transformation was

marked by the emergence of a "new factory system" in which

plants became larger, more complex, and more systematically

organized and managed. And in distribution, the transformation

was marked by the emergence of the jobber, the wholesaler,

and the mass retailer. These changes radically altered

the nature of work during the half century between 1870 and

1920.

To be sure, there were still small workshops, where

skilled craftspeople manufactured products ranging from news-

papers to cabinets to plumbing fixtures. There were the sweatshops

in city tenements, where groups of men and women in

household settings manufactured clothing or cigars on a piece-

work basis. And there were factories in occupations such as

metalwork where individual contractors presided over what

were essentially handicraft proprietorships that coexisted within

a single buildings. But as the number of wage earners in

manufacturing rose from 2.7 million in 18