hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 47 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.
Which of the following best captures the point which the author aims to make by the example of Mary Jones?
- A The percentage of American babies born to never-married mothers has increased spectacularly.
- B Passport forgeries are much more than forgeries of birth certificates
- C In our age, the birth certificate as an official document of personal identity is not as valuable as it was in the $19^{th}$ century
- D Female suffrage has caused the high percentage of divorces
- E The intranational and international nomadism of modern life has resulted in the disintegration of the family
思路引導 VIP
請試著思考：作者在介紹瑪莉·瓊斯的背景資料（出生地、父母姓名）後，隨即提出了一連串「我們無法得知」的問題（例如她是否還住在當地、父母是否仍維持婚姻關係）。這串問題的存在，是為了凸顯那張「出生證明」所提供的資訊，在現代人的真實生活中還剩下多少參考價值？與十九世紀相比，這種價值的變化趨勢是什麼？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
現代社會的身分流動與變遷
同學，恭喜你精準地捕捉到了作者的弦外之音！這題的關鍵在於理解作者如何利用「瑪莉·瓊斯（Mary Jones）」這個虛構人物，來反映出生證明在現代功能的弱化。作者提到，雖然我們知道她的出生地與父母，但現代社會的「高度流動性（nomadism）」與家庭結構的改變，使得這份文件無法再像 19 世紀那樣，定義一個人的成長背景、現居地或家族歸屬。因此，作者才將其比喻為「偽幣」，意指其在證明個人身分上的「市場價值」大不如前。
難度評析與鑑別點
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