Text 4
①It’s no surprise that Jennifer
Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I love My Children, I
Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter – nothing gets people talking like the
suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling,
life-enriching experience. ②Rather
than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior
suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something
that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as
a past-tense condition. ③Even though the
day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior
writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be
sources of intense gratification and delight.”
①The magazine cover showing an
attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child
image on newsstands this week. ②There
are also stories about newly adoptive – and newly single – mom Sandra Bullock,
as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news. ③Practically every week features at least one
celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.
①In a society that so persistently
celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having
children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? ②It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare
the regrets of parents to the regrets of the children. ③Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder
if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with
the message that children are the single most important thing in the world:
obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in
their lives.
①Of course, the image of parenthood
that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely
unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. ②According to several studies concluding that
parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least
happy of all. ③No shock there,
considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on;
yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read:
with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
①It’s hard to imagine that many
people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it
look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. ②But it’s interesting to wonder if the images
we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t in some
small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the
actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting “ the
Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
36.Jennifer
Senior suggests in her article that raising a child can bring .
[A]temporary
delight
[B]enjoyment
in progress
[C]happiness
in retrospect
[D]lasting
reward
37.We
learn from Paragraph 2 that .
[A]celebrity
moms are a permanent source for gossip
[B]single
mothers with babies deserve greater attention
[C]news
about pregnant celebrities is entertaining
[D]having
children is highly valued by the public
38.It is
suggested in Paragraph 3 that childless folks .
[A]are
constantly exposed to criticism
[B]are
largely ignored by the media
[C]fail
to fulfill their social responsibilities
[D]are
less likely to be satisfied with their life
39.According
to Paragraph 4, the message conveyed by celebrity magazines is .
[A]soothing
[B]ambiguous
[C]compensatory
[D]misleading
40.Which
of the following can be inferred from the last paragraph?
[A]Having
children contributes little to the glamour of celebrity moms.
[B]Celebrity
moms have influenced our attitude towards child rearing.
[C]Having
children intensifies our dissatisfaction with life.
[D]We
sometimes neglect the happiness from child rearing.
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