Directions: There are twenty blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet,
The Japanese desire for marriage had been very strong. In the fifth "world youth attitude survey" 1 by the Management and coordination Agency in 1993, over 70 percent of the Japanese 2 chose the answers "One should get married" or "It’s better to get married." Of the 11 countries surveyed, Japan was 3 only by the Philippines in the percentage advocating marriage 4 opposed to a single life.
In recent years, however, there has been a spreading recognition among the Japanese public that something 5 is happening in people’s attitudes toward marriage.
When they began to have adequate food, clothing and shelter years of postwar shortages and thus became able to 6 their attention to other matters, the Japanese for the first time 7 a renewed look at the question of marriage. In the 1990s,people began to ask "What on earth is marriage anyway" and to talk about marriage itself.
In Japan. the proportion of men still unmarried in their thirties reached about 20 percent in the national census taken in 1985, and the 8 apparently exceeded 30 percent in 1995, The proportion of unmarried women in the 25-29 age bracket has been increasing 9 about 5 percent every five years until it is now nearly 50 percent.
What are the real reasons that women choose not to marry Early on, two were 10 : women were now better educated and more women were interested in working outside the home. Many women have become 11 independent, acquiring enough self-confidence to 12 a meaningful life outside of marriage. And 13 seems to be a wide gap in the way men and women view marriage. Women generally believe that, 14 women’s roles in Japan’s postwar society have become diversified, men have essentially remained unchanged 15 such circumstances, communication between the sexes is, in fact, far from easy.
Besides that, in the postwar Japan, individualism has begun to lake 16 . The 50 years since the end of the war be regarded as process of a 17 from the family-centered to the individual-centered way of thinking. In Japan today, society has matured to a point 18 it now tolerates a diversity of marriage styles which were unthinkable not very long ago. In the future, such tolerance is almost 19 to in-crease. But a headlong plunge toward unbridled individualism is also dangerous. The ideal 20 may be to achieve a complementary fusion of the collectivism of Japan’s traditional community and the individual-ism of the new age.