阅读理解 It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I love My Children, I Hate My Life", is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-today experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight."
The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive— and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.
In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.
Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

单选题 Jennifer Senior suggests in her article that raising a child can bring______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】细节题。文章第一段最后一句“…the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight”指出，正是那些当时压抑我们的琐事，日后却成为满足和欢乐的源泉。要注意此句话中的“later”，C项中的“in retrospect”意为“回顾往事，回想”，与之相呼应。故本题选C。A、D两项是根据文中的“moment-to-moment joy”和“intense gratification and delight”的字面含义设置的一对相反的干扰项；B项属于反向干扰。

单选题 We learn from Paragraph 2 that______.

单选题 It is suggested in Paragraph 3 that childless folks______.

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】细节题。文章第三段首句指出，这个社会不断地颂扬生育，随后讲有孩子的人不会去考虑他们是不是不该有孩子，而没有孩子的人却经常受到困扰：世界上唯一重要的是孩子。这两句话原文都使用了被动语态，强调的是外界因素让他们去思考，受到困扰。最后一句话强调，没有孩子的人们，他们的痛苦就直接来源于生活中缺少孩子。社会如此看重孩子，而他们又没有孩子，深受外界困扰，因此可以判断他们经常受到批评。故本题选A。B、C、D三项在文中根本没有提及。