hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 48 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.
According to the author, during the time when the births were locally and ecclesiastically recorded in parish churches,
- A the registration of births was taken as a symbolic replacement of the practice of baptism.
- B the church maintained corporeal relationship with the local government by sharing the record of births.
- C baptisms were about to take place shortly after the registration of births.
- D the birth certificates, along with the passports, were documents for the infant’s inclusion in or exclusion from citizenship.
- E the practice of baptism was not common.
思路引導 VIP
請回到第一段的中段，觀察文中描述「教會登記（registration）」與「洗禮（baptisms）」關係時，使用了哪兩個關鍵字來形容它們在時間上的先後與關聯性？這兩個字如何暗示了兩者發生的距離？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準捕捉到文章中關於宗教時期的描述，這代表你具備非常細膩的閱讀能力。這題的關鍵在於對文中 「foreshadowing imminent baptisms」（預示著即將到來的洗禮）這一片語的理解。
宗教時期的出生紀錄與意義
在十九世紀現代國家興起前，出生登記是由教區教堂（parish churches）負責的。文中明確指出，這種登記不僅是紀錄，更代表了基督徒靈魂以肉身形式出現的徵兆。由於文中使用了 「imminent」（即將發生的）一詞，直接對應了選項 (C) 所描述的「洗禮會在登記後不久舉行」。這說明在當時的社會脈絡下，出生登記與宗教儀式是緊密相連且具備特定時序性的。
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