单选题 Early this week a bit of cheery news was reported by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank: black segregation has hit its lowest point in more than a century — declining in all 85 of the nation"s largest metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, the report is largely celebratory in tone, and it has been received in that fashion by much of the news media. Before we break out the champagne, however, it may be wise to pause and reflect for a moment on who was excluded from the analysis.
Our nation"s prison population has more than quintupled (soaring from 300, 000 in the mid-1970s to more than 2 million today), due to a "get tough" movement and a war on drugs that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color. Studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but a fierce drug war has been waged nonetheless, and harsh mandatory minimum sentences passed, leading to a prison-building boom unprecedented in world history. Despite this sea change, prisoners continue to be treated as nonentities in much sociological and economic analysis.
In the Manhattan Institute study, prisoners are not even mentioned, despite the fact that millions of poor people — overwhelmingly people of color — are removed from their communities and held in prisons, often hundreds of miles from home. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Bars and walls keep hundreds of thousands away from mainstream society — a form of apartheid unlike the world has even seen. If all of them suddenly returned, they would not be evenly throughout the nation"s population. Instead they would return to a relatively small number of communities defined by race and class, greatly intensifying the levels of segregation we see today.
Those who imagine that the failure to account for prisoners can"t possibly affect the analysis would be wise to consider the distortion of unemployment figures in recent years. According to Harvard professor Bruce Western, standard unemployment figures underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less educated black men. In fact, during the 1990s — the economic-boom years — no college black men were the only group that experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, a development directly traceable to the sudden explosion of the prison population. At the same time that unemployment rates were sinking to record low levels for the general population, the true jobless rate among no college black men soared to a staggering 42%.
Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U. S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are. For now, let"s keep the cork in the bottle and pray that we will eventually awaken from our color-blind slumber to the persistent realities of race in America.

单选题 The news media"s response toward the research results announced by the Manhattan Institute is ______.

单选题 The new form of segregation in Paragraph 3 means that ______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】细节事实题
[解析] 文章第三段具体论述了被关押在监狱中的囚犯的数量在人口统计中，尤其是种族隔离统计中扮演的重要角色。有数百万贫民被关押在距家数百里之遥的监狱中，其中绝大多数为有色人种。而且大部分监狱建在白人乡村社区，因此，这几年一种新型的种族隔离悄然出现。这种新型的种族隔离指的就是在白人社区内，黑人被关押在高墙内，而白人在高墙外生活。对这个短语的正确解读应该选择的是[C]。[A]，白人和黑人在监狱中被分开关押，文中并没有提到这种现象。[B]黑人被隔离在主流社会之外，这并没有触及到这种新型的隔离的本质特征，那就是监狱在其中所起的作用。[D]错误，原文明确指出，当这些黑人囚犯被释放出来之后，他们并不会在当地生存，而是不会均匀地散布到全国各地，从而加重种族隔离的现状。

单选题 The statistics in Paragraph 4 is cited by the author to illustrate that ______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】例证题
[解析] 作者在第四段第一句话中就交代了这一段的写作目的。因为作者考虑到有些人会认为他提出来的囚犯在人口普查中所起的重要作用感到怀疑，因此他特意列举了失业数据的例子来说明问题。统计的结果发现，因为没有将囚犯人口统计在内，因此造成了失业数据的大幅失真。作者通过这个例子，并不是想就事论事地讨论失业率的问题，故[A]、[C]错误；而是讨论囚犯人口在人口普查中的不可忽视的地位，故正确答案应该选[D]。而[B]黑人是监狱人口膨胀中的主力军，这个观点作者在第二段中就有所论述，在第四段中并未提及。

单选题 The best title for this article perhaps is ______.

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】中心主旨题
[解析] 本文主要讨论的是美国的种族隔离问题，报告显示种族隔离现象已经大面积改善，但是作者却从这份报告中发现了问题，并且做了翔实的论述。[B]只提到了美国的监狱人满为患的问题，丝毫没有涉及种族隔离现象，自然是错误答案。[C]言过其实，作者通篇的论点只是强调曼哈顿报告不够真实，但是作者也并未就此得到“美国的种族隔离现象非但没有改善，反而出现退化”的结论。[D]偷换概念，出现误差的是一个人口数据报告，而不是新闻媒体的报道。只有[A]最能够概括文章的意思。