『新东方在线托福阅读』为托福考生准备了ETS托福TPO/【学术文章】#19阅读练习：What does the passage mainly discuss?真题题目及答案解析，TPO/【学术文章】#19阅读原文范文音频翻译

托福TPO/【学术文章】#19阅读原文What does the passage mainly discuss?题目答案及解析-新东方托福官方网校手机版

Compared to preindustrial times, the number of hours in the workweek in the nineteenth

The word "norm" in the text is closest in meaning to

What is one reason for the change in the length of the workweek for the average worker in the United States during the 1930's?

Which of the following best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence?

The Evolution of the Workweek According to anthropologists, people in preindustrial societies spent 3 to 4 hours per day or about 20 hours per week doing the work necessary for life. Modern comparisons of the amount of work performed per week, however, begin with the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840) when 10- to 12-hour workdays with six workdays per week were the norm. Even with extensive time devoted to work, both incomes and standards of living were low. As incomes rose near the end of the Industrial Revolution, it became increasingly common to treat Saturday afternoons as a half-day holiday. In the United States, the first third of the twentieth century saw the workweek move from 60 hours per week to just under 50 hours by the start of the 1930s. In 1914 Henry Ford reduced daily work hours at his automobile plants from 9 to 8. In 1926 he announced that his factories would close for the entire day on Saturday. The Depression years of the 1930's brought with them the notion of job sharing to spread available work around; the workweek dropped to a modern low for the United States of 35 hours.In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act mandated a weekly maximum of 40 hours to begin in 1940, and since that time the 8-hour day, 5-day workweek has been the standard in the United States.