单选题
What makes Americans spend nearly half their food dollars on meals away from home? The answers lie in the way Americans live today. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, canned and other convenience foods freed the family cook from full-time duty at the kitchen range.
Then, in the 1940s, work in the wartime defense plants took more women out of the home that ever before, setting the pattern of the working wife and mother. Unless family members pitch in with food preparation, women are not fully liberated from that chore.
It's easier to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on the way home from work or take the family out for pizzas or burgers than to start opening cans or heating up frozen dinners after a long, hard day. Also nowadays, the rising divorce rate means that there are more single working parents with children to feed. And many young adults and elderly people, as well as unmarried and divorced mature people, live alone rather than as a part of a family unit and don't want to bother cooking for one. Fast food is appealing because it is fast, it doesn't require any dressing up, it offers a "fun" break in the daily routine, and the outlay of money seems small. It can be eaten in the car, sometimes picked up at a drive-in window without even getting out, or on the run. Even if it is brought home to eat, there will never be any dirty dishes to wash because of the handy disposable wrappings. Children, especially, love fast food because it's finger food, no struggling with knives and forks, no annoying instructions from adults about table manners.

单选题 Americans enjoy fast food mainly because ______.

单选题 It can be inferred that children ______.

单选题 Many Americans are eating out and not cooking at home nowadays because ______.

单选题 According to the text, a drive-in window is a ______.

单选题 The expression "pitch in with" (Line 2, Para 2) probably means ______.