单选题 The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week"s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.
Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary Census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most worrying long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force.
With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.
Charles McMillion, the president and chief economist of MBG Information Services in Washington, is an expert on employment and has been looking closely for years at the issue of labor force participation. "Over the past three months," he said, "1,155,000 unemployed people dropped out of the active labor force and were not counted as unemployed. Even ignoring population growth, if these unemployed had not dropped out of the labor force, simple arithmetic shows that the official unemployment rate would have risen from 9.9 percent in April to 10.2 percent in July, rather than—as it has—fallen to 9.5 percent."
Because of normal growth in the working-age population, the labor force increases by roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people per month. If those folks were factored in, said Mr. McMillion, "unemployment now would be even higher than 10.2 percent."
We are not even beginning to cope with this crisis, which began long before the onset of the so-called Great Recession. The economy is showing absolutely no sign of countering the nation"s shocking jobs deficit.
They may be thinking about this in Washington, but they sure aren"t doing much about it. The politicians" approach to the jobs crisis has been like passing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Millions are suffering and the entire economy is being undermined, and what are they doing? They"re appropriating more and more money for warfare while frantically talking about balancing the budget.
We"re not heading toward the danger zone. We"re there. The U.S. will not remain a stable society if this great employment crisis is not addressed directly—and soon. You cannot allow joblessness on this scale to aggravate. It"s wrong, and the adverse effect will be as destructive and intolerable as it is inevitable.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 第二、三段提到，失业率中没有反映18.1万工作者自愿离开劳动力队伍这个现实，这些人不再找工作，但是由于统计失业率的方式过于理想化，他们没有被算作失业者。在第三段中，Alice-in-Wonderland意为illusory(幻想的)，unreal(不真实的)。第四段提到Charles McMillion对官方数据的批评，认为如果把这些离开积极劳动力大军的人都算进去，失业率应该是上升了，而不是目前统计的下降数字。第五段也提到了统计数字可能存在的缺失。