1997年1月托福阅读全真试题
Question 1-8
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