Beyond the Factory: Child Labor in the Cities At the beginning of the nineteenth

Beyond the Factory: Child Labor in theCities

At the beginning of the nineteenth century,factory owners faced few restrictions on the way they employed their childrenworkers, who were between the age of 7 and 12. Gradually laws came into being.

The first child-labor laws were passed atthe state level in America and usually focused on both required education and aminimum age for employment. And added rules limited the length of the workdayfor children. Pennsylvania, for example, limited the workday to 10 hours forchildren under 12. However, government officials cared little whetherbusinesses followed the law. In fact one group of children was left entirelyunprotected by labor laws -- the children of immigrant families.

By the beginning of the twentieth century,piecework appeared, for which people were paid by the piece. Significantnumbers of women sewed baby dresses or men's neckties and made the artificialflowers used to decorate hats. Piecework turned homes into factories that werefree from the law, and countless children worked long hours alongside theirmothers and old sisters.

Manufactures exploited the system shamelesslyand paid the lowest wages they could. Embroidering (刺绣) a silk dress, which was a10-day job, might generate a five-dollar payment. In the case of"willowing", workers needed to add more strands to ostrich feathersused on hats to make them longer and more graceful. The first willowers werepaid 15 cents per inch, but a few months later, the pay was reduced to 13cents. Within three years, willowers were earning only three cents per inch.

In order to survive under thesecircumstances, pieceworkers had even their youngest children help them. In oneItalian neighborhood, a three-year-old girl helped her mother sew clothes. Inanother case, a child of eight who had lived in New York for three years hadnever been to school at all and could speak almost no English. Slowly childlabor laws brought these abuses to an end.

31. The first child-labor laws required______.

A. workplace safety and conditions

B. minimum payment and age

C. education and working time

D. minimum payment and schooling

32. Manufactures who hired women to dopiecework ______.

A. were kind and concerned employers

B. were sometimes called"willowers"

C. usually paid the lowest salary

D. forced children to turn home intofactories

33. "Willowing" was a kind of______.

A. handwork activity          B. workplace

C. payment requirement             D.workers

34. By raising the example of thethree-year-old girl's experience in the last paragraph, the author intended to______.

A. show how poor the situations were forchildren workers

B. blame those adult pieceworkers forallowing children to work

C. attract attention to protect youngchildren

D. emphasize the importance of educatingyoung children

35. Which of the following sentences bestsummarizes the passage?

A. The first child-labor laws were limiteddue to working at the state level.

B. Early child-labor laws offered noprotection to children who worked at home.

C. Some immigrant children did not learnEnglish because of their piecework.

D. Child-labor laws should have come intobeing before children became workers.

试题答案

【答案】

 C

 C

 A

 A

 B

【解析】略