C
The relationship between the home and market economies has gone through two distinct stages. Early industrialization began the process of transferring some production processes (e. g. cloth, sewing and caning foods) from the home to the marketplace. Although the home economy could still produce these goods, the processed were laborious (费力的) and the market economy was usually more efficient. Soon, the more important second stage was evident—the marketplace began producing goods and services that had never been produced by the home economy, and the home economy was unable to produce them (e. g. electricity and electrical appliances, the automobile, advanced education, sophisticated medical care). In the second stage, the question of whether the home economy was less efficient in producing these new goods and services was irrelevant; if the family were to enjoy these fruits of industrialization, they would have to obtained in the marketplace. The traditional ways of taking care of these needs in the home, such as in nursing the sick, became socially unacceptable (and, in most serious cases ,probably less successful). Just as the appearance of the automobile made the use of the horse—drawn carriage illegal and then impractical, and the appearance of television changed the radio from a source of entertainment to a source of background music, so most of the fruits of economic growth did not increase the options available to the home economy to either produce the goods or services or purchase them in the market. Growth brought with it increased variety in consumer goods, but not increased flexibility for the home economy in obtaining these goods and services. Instead, economic growth brought with it increased consumer reliance on the marketplace. In order to consume these new goods and services, the family had to enter the marketplace as wage earners and consumers. The neoclassical(新古曲主义的) model that views the family as deciding whether to produce goods and services directly or to purchase them in the marketplace is basically a model of the first stage. It cannot accurately be applied to the second (and current) stage. |
The reason why many production processes were taken over by the marketplace was that ______ .
A.
it was a necessary step in the process of industrialization
B.
they depended on electricity available only to the market economy
C.
it was troublesome to produce such goods in the home
D.
the marketplace was more efficient with respect to these processes