[A 卷] College English Achievement Test --- Band Two --- 试 题 册 （120 分钟） Part II Reading Comprehension Passage OneWhat makes Americans spend nearly half their food dollars on meals away from home The answers lie in the way Americans live today. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, canned and convenience foods freed the family cook from full-time duty at the kitchen range. Then, in the 1940s, work in the wartime defense plants took more women out of the home than ever before, setting the pattern of the working wife and mother. Today about half of the country’s married women are employed outside the home. But, unless family members pitch in with food preparation, women are not fully liberated from that chore. Instead many have become, in a sense, prisoners of the completely cooked convenience meal. It is easier to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on the way home from work or to take the family out for pizzas, or burgers than to start opening cans or heating up frozen dinners after a long, hard day. Also, the rising divorce rate means that there are more single working parents with children to feed. And many young adults and elderly people, as well as unmarried and divorced mature people, live alone rather than as part of a family unit and don’t want to bother cooking for one. Fast food is appealing because it is fast, it doesn’t require any dressing up, and it offers a “fun” break. 21. American women left home to work in large numbers because of _____________. A) the improved living standard B) the increase in food prices C) the need of war-time industry D) the modernization of the kitchen22. The phrase “pitch in” in Line 2, Paragraph 2, is ...
