1 . Traditional wisdom says that if you want to be richer, a useful thing to do is get married. Life is cheaper when only one mortgage (贷款) to pay and someone else can do certain tasks — cooking or car repair — more efficiently than you. The research by Ohio State University’s Zagorsky shows the married increase their wealth an average 16% a year, while those who are single increase their net worth at half that rate.
Yet the economic benefit of marriage isn’t what it used to be. In a book, Changing Poverty, Changing Policies, a social scientist show that the marriage premium (附加值) has fallen. Cancian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, set out to study how the changing make-up of American families has affected the number of people below the poverty line. Considering how the rate of marriage has fallen and the rate of divorce has risen, the researcher expected the number of people with their born younger generation living below the poverty line to grow by 2.6%. But when he looked at the data, poverty had increased by less than half that amount.
Why? Because single women, even those with kids, have an easier time supporting themselves outside of marriage than they used to. More women are working, increasingly for wages that are competitive with those of men. Women are having children later in life, and fewer of them. Besides, a growing percentage of women who have children but aren’t married don’t live on their own. In 1970, 62% of single mothers were the only adult in their household, but by 2019, just 55% are living without another means of support — thanks to more women living together with a male partner or grandparent.
That’s not to say marriage doesn’t coincide with (与一致) economic benefits. A child in a single parent family, for instance, is five times as likely to live below the poverty line. What Cancian tries to illustrate, though, is that marriage wouldn’t necessarily produce more wealth. Marrying someone who is unemployed for a long time might very well not be an economic increase.
1. According to paragraph 1, what’s the benefit of getting married?| A．The wealth of the married people increased more. |
| B．One could leave the housework to the other. |
| C．The couple could own more than one house. |
| D．The couple would become the rich people. |
| A．women do not want to have children or just fewer of them |
| B．more women are working and can make more money than men |
| C．single women meet fewer challenges to feed themselves than before |
| D．single mothers now enjoy living with a male partner or grandparents |
| A．One of the marriage partners must have strong economic background. |
| B．The couples are not trapped in unemployment for a long time. |
| C．The men who support the families have a good salary. |
| D．The women can earn much more than their partners. |
| A．To give information about marriage and wealth. |
| B．To suggest a new method of building more wealth. |
| C．To compare married persons with single ones. |
| D．To persuade people to get married. |
