Section A
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Electricity was born at the dawn of the last century. From then on, households have been inundated with a flood of home electric goods. What is the impact of this home electric goods revolution
It is argued here that the home electric goods revolution may liberate women from the home. And it is true that many households never hesitate a second to adopt this new technology or that, however, in fact many of the home electric goods which are advertised as liberating the modem woman tend to have the opposite effect, because they simply change the nature of work instead of eliminating it. Machines have a certain novelty value, like toys for s. It is certainly less tiring to put clothes in a washing machine, but the time saved does not really amount to much the machine has to be watched, the clothes have to be carefully sorted out first, stains removed by hand, buttons pushed and water changed, clothes taken out, aired and ironed. It would be more liberating to pack it all off to a laundry and not necessarily more expensive, since no capital in vestment is required. Similarly, if you really want to save time, you do not make cakes with an electric mixer, you buy one in a shop.
If one compares the image of the woman in the women’s magazine with the goods advertised by those periodicals, one realizes how useful a projected image can be commercially. A carefulbalance has to be struck: if you show a labor-saving device, follow it up with a complicated recipe on the next page; on no account hint at the notion that a woman could get herself a job, but in stead foster her sense of her own usefulness, emphasizing the creative aspect of her function as a housewife. So we get cake mixes (蛋糕粉) in which the cook simply adds an egg herself, to pro duce "that lovely homo-baked flavor the family love", and knitting patterns that can be made by hand, or worse still, on knitting machines, which became tremendously fashionable when they were first introduced. Automatic cookers are advertised by pictures of pretty young mothers taking their children to the park, not by professional women presetting the dinner before leaving home for work. According to the author, what is women’s stereotyped role in social life