2013届高三英语高考复习：拓展精练14.docVIP

阅读理解 A Despite their name, the Want Family don’t want much. They want enough money for a nice house and a holiday every year. But they don’t want to be millionaires. They want to do well at their jobs. But they don’t want to be the big boss. They do want to spend time improving their garden, visiting their families and taking their two kids, Nicolas and Leuan, to McDonald’s for lunch. But they don’t want to be famous. The Wants just want to be normal. That’s why they are famous. They have been selected as the most normal family in Britain. After a six-month search for the most ordinary family in Britain, the Wants were selected from hundreds of applicants. John Want works in marketing for a food company. Claire has a part-time job renting out children’s play equipment. John doesn’t understand why they were chosen to represent ordinary English families. How are they normal? That is not a bad question. Nearly everyone does some of the things that the Wants do. But very few people do all of them. There have been great changes in the social structure of British life. It is becoming more common for people to have children when they are older than the Wants, and to have one child instead of two. A household with two children may be headed by a single parent, usually the mother. Or perhaps dad and mum are still together, but not married. Or maybe dad and mum are married. Dad goes out to work and mum stays at home and looks after the kids. They have traditional values. Every weekend the whole family goes to church. “What we have here is not an average family, but a traditional family,” says Cary Cooper, professor of philosophy at Lancaster University. “There is no such thing as a normal family anymore, in the way there was 20 or 30 years ago. Of course the Wants exist, but for what do we need to celebrate them?” Perhaps because we think normal families are an endangered species. Examples of them have to be preserved to show future generations. 1. The Wants