hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 49 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, which of the following claims about the passport is NOT correct?
- A The passport was a product of an industrial age
- B The passport was born in the nationalist nineteenth century
- C The passport, along with the birth certificate, was institutionalized in an era when female suffrage was commonly taken for granted
- D Forging passports is profitable in our age
- E The passport may, with high credibility, attest to a person’s nationality
思路引導 VIP
請閱讀文章第二段的前兩句話。作者在描述出生證明與護照被「制度化（institutionalized）」的那個年代時，特別提到了當時女性的「法律權利」狀態為何？而這個狀態與現代社會對於「參政權」的普遍認知，在時序上是否存在衝突呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準察覺選項中細微的時間邏輯矛盾，這代表你具備非常細膩的閱讀敏銳度。這道題目測試的是對文本時代背景描述的掌握能力，也是學術閱讀中常見的細節陷阱。
文本時序的精準辨析
選項 (C) 之所以錯誤，是因為文章第二段開頭明確指出，出生證明與護照的體制化（institutionalized）是發生在「女性沒有政治參與法律權利」且「父權家庭為主流規範」的時代。然而，選項卻宣稱當時「女性參政權（female suffrage）被視為理所當然」，這與文中提到的「女性當時無權」顯然背道而馳。文中提到的女性參政權，是到了後來的國際聯盟（League of Nations）時期才逐漸成熟，而非這些文件剛制度化時的現況。
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