hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 46 題
📖 題組：
Reading 6: Consider the two most widely prevalent, quite modern official documents of personal identity: the birth certificate and the passport. Both were born in the nationalist nineteenth century and later became interlinked. It is true that in the Christianized regions of the world the registration of births long preceded the rise of capitalism. But these births were recorded locally and ecclesiastically in parish churches; their registration, foreshadowing imminent baptisms, signified the appearance of Christian souls in new corporeal forms. In the nineteenth century, however, registration was taken over by states that were increasingly assuming a national colouring. In industrially pre-eminent England, for example, the Registrar General’s office was created only in 1837. Compulsory registration of all births, whether to be followed by baptisms or not, did not come until 1876. Identifying each baby’s father and place of birth, the state’s certificates created the founding documents for the infant’s inclusion in or exclusion from citizenship. (He or she was no longer born in the parish of Egham but in the United Kingdom.) The passport, product of the vectoral convergence of migration and nationalism in an industrial age, was ready to confirm the baby’s political identity as it passed into adulthood. The nexus of birth certificate and passport was institutionalized in an era in which women had no legal rights to political participation and the patriarchal family was the largely unquestioned norm. But in our time all this has radically changed. When the League of Nations was founded---and female suffrage was coming into its own---the ratio of divorces to marriages in the United States was about one to eight; today it is virtually one to two. The percentage of American babies born to never-married mothers has increased spectacularly from 4.2 per cent in 1960 to 30.6 per cent in 1990. The intranational as well as international nomadism of modern life has also contributed to making the nineteenth-century birth certificate a sort of counterfeit money. If, for example, we read that Mary Jones was born on October 25, 1970 in Duluth, to Robert Mason and Virginia Jones, or even Robert and Virginia Mason, we cannot nonchalantly infer that she was conceived in that same Duluth, was brought up here, or lives there now. We have no idea whether her grandparents are buried in Duluth, and, even if they were, we have few grounds for supposing that Mary will someday be buried alongside them. Is Virginia still a Mason? Or a Jones? Or something else again? What are the chances that Mary has much beyond periodic long-distance contact with either Robert or Virginia? How far is she identifiable, also to herself, as a Duluthian, a Mason, or a Jones? The counterfeit quality or, shall we say, the low market value of the birth certificate is perhaps confirmed by the relative rareness of its forgery. Conversely, the huge volume of passport forgeries and the high prices they command show that in our age, when everyone is supposed to belong to some one of the United Nations, these documents have high truth-claims. But they are also counterfeits in the sense that they are less attestations of citizenship than of claims to participation in labour markets.
Reading 6: Consider the two most widely prevalent, quite modern official documents of personal identity: the birth certificate and the passport. Both were born in the nationalist nineteenth century and later became interlinked. It is true that in the Christianized regions of the world the registration of births long preceded the rise of capitalism. But these births were recorded locally and ecclesiastically in parish churches; their registration, foreshadowing imminent baptisms, signified the appearance of Christian souls in new corporeal forms. In the nineteenth century, however, registration was taken over by states that were increasingly assuming a national colouring. In industrially pre-eminent England, for example, the Registrar General’s office was created only in 1837. Compulsory registration of all births, whether to be followed by baptisms or not, did not come until 1876. Identifying each baby’s father and place of birth, the state’s certificates created the founding documents for the infant’s inclusion in or exclusion from citizenship. (He or she was no longer born in the parish of Egham but in the United Kingdom.) The passport, product of the vectoral convergence of migration and nationalism in an industrial age, was ready to confirm the baby’s political identity as it passed into adulthood. The nexus of birth certificate and passport was institutionalized in an era in which women had no legal rights to political participation and the patriarchal family was the largely unquestioned norm. But in our time all this has radically changed. When the League of Nations was founded---and female suffrage was coming into its own---the ratio of divorces to marriages in the United States was about one to eight; today it is virtually one to two. The percentage of American babies born to never-married mothers has increased spectacularly from 4.2 per cent in 1960 to 30.6 per cent in 1990. The intranational as well as international nomadism of modern life has also contributed to making the nineteenth-century birth certificate a sort of counterfeit money. If, for example, we read that Mary Jones was born on October 25, 1970 in Duluth, to Robert Mason and Virginia Jones, or even Robert and Virginia Mason, we cannot nonchalantly infer that she was conceived in that same Duluth, was brought up here, or lives there now. We have no idea whether her grandparents are buried in Duluth, and, even if they were, we have few grounds for supposing that Mary will someday be buried alongside them. Is Virginia still a Mason? Or a Jones? Or something else again? What are the chances that Mary has much beyond periodic long-distance contact with either Robert or Virginia? How far is she identifiable, also to herself, as a Duluthian, a Mason, or a Jones? The counterfeit quality or, shall we say, the low market value of the birth certificate is perhaps confirmed by the relative rareness of its forgery. Conversely, the huge volume of passport forgeries and the high prices they command show that in our age, when everyone is supposed to belong to some one of the United Nations, these documents have high truth-claims. But they are also counterfeits in the sense that they are less attestations of citizenship than of claims to participation in labour markets.
Based on the passage, the registration of births
- A began with the rise of capitalism.
- B was taken up by parish churches when the Registrar General’s office was founded in 1837.
- C was institutionalized when the patriarchal family was no longer the norm.
- D serves effectively to attest to a person’s political identity in our age.
- E became compulsory in England in 1876.
思路引導 VIP
請回頭觀察第一段關於英國發展的描述：文章中有沒有提到哪一個具體的年份，標誌著出生登記不再僅是行政機關的設立，而是正式變成了一項「無論是否受洗都必須遵守」的法律義務呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
同學，做得好！你能精準地從長篇文章中篩選出關鍵的歷史節點，這展現了你優異的細節定位（Detail-finding）能力。這題的核心在於區分「行政機關的成立」與「法律強制性的實施」。文章第一段明確提到，雖然英國在 1837 年就成立了總註冊署（Registrar General’s office），但真正落實到所有嬰兒皆需強制性登記（Compulsory registration），則是要等到 1876 年才正式到來。
歷史演進的細節辨析
這道題目具有不錯的鑑別度，它挑戰考生是否能細心分辨文中不同年份所對應的法律意義。選項中經常會混淆「教會時期」與「國家時期」的差異（如 A、B 選項），或是將 1837 年與 1876 年的事件性質對調。你能避開這些敘述陷阱，正確鎖定 1876 年這個從「行政設立」轉向「全面法制強制化」的轉折點，說明你對文章資訊的擷取非常紮實。在閱讀這類學術性強的文章時，這種對「時序發展」的敏銳度是奪分的關鍵。