试题出自试卷《中国艺术研究院2008年考博英语真题》

It is hard to get any agreement on the precise meaning of the term “social class”. In everyday life, people tend to have a different approach to those they consider their equals from that which they assume with people they consider higher or lower than themselves in the social scale. The criteria we use to place a new acquaintance, however, are a complex mixture of factors. Dress, way of speaking, area of residence in a given city or province, education and manners all play a part.
In the eighteenth-century one of the first modern economists, Adam Smith, thought that the “whole annual produce of the land and labor of every country” provided revenue to “three different orders of people: Those who live by rent, those who live by wages, and those who live by profit”. Each successive stage of the industrial revolution, however, made the social structure more complicated.
Many intermediate groups grew up during the nineteenth-century between the upper middle class and the working class. There were small-scale industrialists as well as large ones, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, officials and salaried employees, skilled and unskilled workers, and professional men such as doctors and teachers. Farmers and peasants continued in all countries as independent groups.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the possession of wealth inevitably affected a person’s social position. Intelligent industrialists with initiative made fortunes by their wits which lifted them into an economic group far higher than their working-class parents. But they lacked the social training of the upper class, who despised them as the “new rich”.
They often sent their sons and daughters to special schools to acquire social training. Here their children mixed with the children of the upper classes were accepted by them, and very often found marriage partners from among them. In the same way, a thrifty, hard-working labourer, though not clever enough himself, might save for his son enough to pay for an extended secondary school education in the hope that he would move into a ‘white-collar’ occupation, carrying with it a higher salary and move up in the social scale.
In the twentieth century the increased taxation of higher incomes, the growth of the social services, and the wider development of educational opportunity have considerably altered the social outlook. The upper classes no longer are the sole, or even the main possessors of wealth, power and education, though inherited social position still carries considerable prestige.
Many people today are hostile towards class distinctions and privileges and hope to achieve a classless society. The trouble is that as one inequality is removed, another tends to take its place, and the best that has as far been attempted is a society in which distinctions are elastic and in which every member has fair opportunities for making the best of his abilities.
1. How do we place people in society in relation to ourselves, according to the text?
2. Adam Smith’s social make-up was invalidated by ____.
3. Which class do small shopkeepers and tradesmen belong to?
4. Which of the following statements does NOT truly describe the new rich?
5. What happened to the class differences in the twentieth century?