河南省郑州一中2018届高三上学期阶段试（四）英语试卷（含答案）.docVIP

18 届高三阶段测试（四） 英语试题 第一部分 听力 （略） 第二部分 阅读理解（共两节，满分 40 分） 第一节（共 15 小题：每小题 2 分，满分 30 分） A It’s four o’clock on a Wednesday at a private swimming pool in the Washington, D.C. area. Two fathers talk about getting their kids ready for a baseball-themed birthday party that evening. Both fathers are trying to get their sons dried, dressed and ready to get in the car. When I ask one of the fathers if he is a stay-at-home dad, he quickly answers, “no.” But, then he adds that he did lose his job six weeks ago. He says he is temporarily a stay-at-home Dad. The other father, RJ Respress, has been a stay-at-home dad for the past 10 years. He has a 10-year-old son named Ben and a 7-year-old daughter named Sophie. Being a stay-at-home dad now, he says, is much different than it was 10 years ago. “… and so when I first started staying home, there weren’t a lot of dads around. It wasn’t a thing yet. And being home as a dad at that point you definitely stood out. I stood out. But now, I don’t think it makes a lot of difference, honestly. The stay-at-home dad phenomenon, if you will, I think, everyone seems to know about it. It’s not peculiar. You see them all the time.” He is right. Families in the U.S. are changing. A new study finds that in the U.S. more than two million fathers are staying home to take care of the house and family. This number is twice that of 25 years ago. In 2012, 16 percent of all parents in the U.S. were stay-at-home dads. Gretchen Livingston is with the Pew Research Center. She says the number of stay-at-home dads is only going to grow. She says in the last 25 years there have been changes as far as dads taking on more care giving responsibilities and mothers taking on more bread-winner responsibilities. She adds that the number of hours a day that dads spend caring for their kids has tripled in the past decades. That is a huge change. The study finds that disability, sickness and unemployment are among the reasons that fathers stay home. But, some