【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 1-5
M: Were conditions in coal mines in the nineteenth century really as bad as people imagine?
W: Well, up to the middle of the nineteenth century at least, miners did work in terrible conditions, even worse than most people imagine probably. And of course it wasn't only the men who had to work in the mines—most mining families were so poor, you see, that the women and children had to go down the mine as well. Now the men had the job of actually digging the coal out, which meant that sometimes they had to crouch in tiny tunnels and dig away at the coal face. And the women had the job of face, such as carrying the coal away, and in the very early days they actually had to carry the coal in sacks on their backs from the coal face all the way up to the surface, up steep ladders.
M: What about the children?
W: Well, they could use horses in the widest tunnels. When the tunnels were too low for the horses, then they used the children instead, and these children had to pull trucks of coal, weighing, ooh, sometimes as much as half a ton or a ton along passages that were only a few feet high, and the owners sometimes made the children work for 12 hours or more at a time, and they made them stay down the mine underground all that time, and they didn't let them have breaks for food or anything like that. They just had to work. And this was really the worst part of it, that the mine owners had complete power, you see, they could do whatever they liked. If they wanted to, they could make them work longer hours and there wasn't really anything the miners could do about it, and this went on for quite a long time, partly because mining communities were so isolated that people didn't realize that mine owners were making children do the terrible jobs, and later when the public did find out about it, people began to raise objections.
M: So then laws were introduced. Were they to make it illegal to use children?
W: Yes that's right, in the 1840s. But the interesting thing was that even when they did know what was happening, people weren't so worried about children having to work in mines, the main thing they objected to was women and young girls working in the mines with men, which they thought was immoral. You see, it was very hot down the mines and so the miners wore very few clothes, and people found this very shocking. And that was why after the first law was passed in 1842, children were still allowed to work underground for several more years.
M: Of course at that time I suppose there were no unions or anything like that—the miners had no power at all?
W: No, none at all, at first. In fact at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were actually laws called Combination Laws. Now according to these laws, workers weren't allowed to join together in any way to fight for more pay or shorter hours or better working conditions, and if they did so, those responsible would be arrested and put into prison. And it was only later that the miners were actually allowed to form unions, and of course this made an enormous difference, because then the owners had to start improving conditions and introduce safety measures—but it all happened very slowly and things didn't really start to improve until very late in the nineteenth century.
1. What work did men have to do in coal mines in the early nineteenth century?