hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 50 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.
Here are three statements with regard to the nineteenth-century England:
I. The nineteenth-century England held a dominant position in industry
II. The nineteenth-century England was increasingly assuming a national colouring
III. Women had the right to vote in the nineteenth-century England
Based on the passage,
I. The nineteenth-century England held a dominant position in industry
II. The nineteenth-century England was increasingly assuming a national colouring
III. Women had the right to vote in the nineteenth-century England
Based on the passage,
- A Only I is correct.
- B Both II and III are correct.
- C Only III is correct.
- D Both I and II are correct.
- E All of the three statements are correct.
思路引導 VIP
請觀察文章第二段的開頭與結尾：作者在描述 19 世紀「出生證明制度」建立的時空背景時，是如何描述當時女性的政治權利狀況的？這個描述與後來提到「國際聯盟（League of Nations）成立」的時代有什麼樣的對比？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你答對了！這顯示你對文章細節的掌握非常精準，能從密集的歷史資訊中準確抽絲剝繭。
十九世紀的英國國情與制度
關於 19 世紀英國的描述，文中明確使用了 "industrially pre-eminent"（工業上卓越領先的） 一詞，這直接證實了敘述 I 的正確性。接著，作者將英國作為具體案例，用來闡述 19 世紀的國家政權如何開始**「渲染民族國家色彩」（assuming a national colouring）**，並透過建立「總註冊署」（Registrar General’s office）來強化國家對個人身分的掌握，故敘述 II 亦完全符合文意。至於敘述 III，文中特別點出在該制度化的年代，女性「沒有參與政治的法律權利」，女性投票權（female suffrage）則是要到 20 世紀初國際聯盟成立時才逐漸成熟，因此 III 並不符合 19 世紀的時空背景。
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