Part ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by c

Part A

Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D . Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.

Children are a relatively modem invention. Until a few hundred years ago they did not exist. In Medieval and Renaissance painting you can see pint-sized men and women, wearing grown-up clothes and grown-up expressions, performing grown-up tasks. Children did not exist because the family as we know it had not evolved.

Children today not only exist; they have taken over, in no place more than in America, and at no time more than now. It is always Kids' Country here. Our civilization is child-centered, child-obsessed. A kid's body is our physical ideal. One way or another we are determined to "keep in shape", and invariably this means keeping a kid's shape. On Kids' Country we do not permit middle age. Thirty is promoted over 50, but 30 knows that soon his time to be overtaken will come. In our over-sixty population there are ten widows for every man. Like a child's room, Kids' Country is a mess. New York city seems about to disappear under its load of litter, graffiti and dog-droppings. How is it that China can eliminate the house-fly, and we can't even clean up Central Park？

We are the first society in which parents expect to learn from their children. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, ours is an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids. In the Old Country, hope was in the father, and how much wealth he could accumulate and pass along to his children. In the growth pattern of America and its ever-expanding frontier, the young man was ever advised to GO WEST; the father was ever inheriting from his son. Kids' Country may be the inevitable result.

Kids' Country is not all bad. America is the greatest country in the world to grow up in because it is Kids' Country. We not only wear kids' clothes and eat kids' food, but also dream kids' dreams and make them come true. It was after all, a boy's game to go to the moon.

But what we are experiencing now seems in many ways the exactly opposite of Medieval and Renaissance life. If in the old days children did not exist, it seems equally true today that adults, as a class have begun to disappear, condemning all of us to remain boys and girls forever, jogging and doing push-ups against eternity.

Why does the writer use the Medieval and Renaissance painting in Paragraph 1 ？

A．To show that men and women were smaller than now.

B．To show that there were no children at all at that time.

C．To show that children wore and acted like adults at that time.

D．To show that children were not permitted to appear in paintings.