Last September, the U.S. government announced that its birthrate fell to "another record low". Morally speaking, there"s nothing wrong with this. It"s【C1】______. in a way. All over the world, birthrates tend to fall a-long with economic development. The thing about an increasingly childless economy is that it has major implications for【C2】______. It is confirmed by a new data from a Gallup survey【C3】______on the average daily spending of families. Even after you control for income, age, education, and【C4】______status, families with young kids spend more every day. What are parents spending on? Not just books, toys, and games. The Department of Agriculture【C5】______surveys the many ways we spend on our kids, to the tune of about $14,000 a year. The【C6】______majority of money goes to the【C7】______: housing, food, transportation, and education. Housing is kind of funny, because young children tend not to have their housing units,【C8】______the parents are extremely well-off and the children are terribly misbehaved. The survey estimates the housing portion of spending by trying to【C9】______a few factors: the cost of an extra bedroom, the cost of moving into safer【C10】______with better schools, and the cost of buying homes with larger yards. It is【C11】______that on economic growth, some of the most discussed variables on editorial pages and cable news are policy choices like tax rates or international events. But buried【C12】______these headlines is the glacier of demographics, the steady and unyielding force of human numbers to【C13】______the economy. The【C14】______in U.S. birthrates in recent years has almost certainly had a negative effect on consumer spending (and,【C15】______, lower birthrates are probably an outcome of the recession). In particular, childless couples don"t need space for more kids so they"re less【C16】______to buy homes in the suburbs,【C17】______demand for housing that badly needs to sell more homes. In other words,【C18】______families and less household formation【C19】______the U.S. economy of housing and transportation spending, which has historically accounted for half of family【C20】______.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】解析：空格处需要能连接buried与these headlines间的介词。此句欲探讨上句中所说期刊和新闻“标题”中所透露的经济信息。句中glacier意为“冰川”，生活中常有“冰川一角”来描述某种小现象下隐藏的重要信息，因此buried后介词应有“……下”的意思。B项underneath“在……之下”常修饰被隐藏着的东西，故正确。