语篇提能
Ⅰ.阅读理解
The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a discouraging thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history show, hasn't meant economic freedom.
Employment became widespread when the enclosures(圈地运动) of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by taking them away from the use of the land, and thus from the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people traveled longer distances to their place of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the place in which they lived.
Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In pre－industrial times, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume this norm(准则) today, and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between sexes. It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form of work, young people and old people were kept out — a problem now, as more teenagers disappointed and annoyed at school and more retired people want to live active lives.
All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some efforts and resources away from the utopian(乌托邦式的) goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping more people
