单选题 I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room—a women"s group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening one man had been particularly talkative frequently offering ideas and anecdotes while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don"t talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement. He gestured toward his wife and said, "She"s the talker in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It"s true," he explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn"t keep the conversation going, we"d spend the whole evening in silence."
This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.
The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed—but only a few of the men—gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year—a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.
In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: "He doesn"t listen to me." "He doesn"t talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be first and foremost conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.
In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

单选题 What is most wives" main expectation of their husbands?

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】[解析] 这实际上跟全文的主要话题有关。本文的基本观点是，由于夫妻很少谈话交流，特别是丈夫不理睬妻子想谈话的愿望，这造成了婚姻问题和离婚率的上升。第四段更清楚地表达了妻子们的expectation。这一段是全文的核心段落，因为在这一段中作者开始介绍自己的研究结果。最后一段是对全文的总结，也提到了妻子想交流而丈夫不予理睬的问题。事实上，第一段就已经提到妇女经常抱怨丈夫不跟自己说话(参阅第一段第三句)。

单选题 Judging from the context, the phrase "wreaking havoc" (Line 2～3, Para.2) most probably means ______

单选题 All of the following are true EXCEPT ______

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 第三段最后一句不是说近50%的离婚案都是谈话失败造成的，而是说美国家庭的总体离婚率是50%，而其中相当一部分是由谈话失败造成的。事实也不可能是美国家庭的破裂统统都是由夫妻间的交流失败造成的。本句的上一句也提到，被采访的妇女中大部分人(most)说缺乏交流是她们离婚的原因。

单选题 Which of the following can best summarize the main idea of this text?

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 本题提问本文的中心思想，因此需要考察各段的基本主题，并将各段的基本主题联系起来找出本文的主旨。本文第一段提到了一个例子，这个例子就说明了丈夫和妻子在家里和在公共场所说话的多寡不同。第二段的第一句总结了这个例子，第二句提到这种模式给婚姻造成的破坏性影响。下文对此做了更深入的分析，引证了其他研究者和作者本人的研究作为主要论据。