文/  北京新东方学校 北美部GMAT项目组 李昊 周帆

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　　文章及题目：

　　(Line) In the seventeenth-century Florentine textile

　　industry, women were employed primarily in low-

　　paying, low-skill jobs. To explain this segregation of

　　labor by gender, economists have relied on the

　　(5) useful theory of human capital. According to this

　　theory, investment in human capital—the

　　acquisition of difficult job-related skills—generally

　　benefits individuals by making them eligible to

　　engage in well-paid occupations. Women’s role as

　　(10) child bearers, however, results in interruptions in

　　their participation in the job market (as compared

　　with men’s) and thus reduces their opportunities to

　　acquire training for highly skilled work. In addition,

　　the human capital theory explains why there was a

　　(15) high concentration of women workers in certain

　　low-skill jobs, such as weaving, but not in others,

　　such as combing or carding, by positing that

　　because of their primary responsibility in child

　　rearing women took occupations that could be

　　(20) carried out in the home.

　　There were, however, differences in pay scales

　　that cannot be explained by the human capital

　　theory. For example, male construction workers

　　were paid significantly higher wages than female

　　(25) taffeta weavers. The wage difference between

　　these two low-skill occupations stems from the

　　segregation of labor by gender: because a limited

　　number of occupations were open to women, there

　　was a large supply of workers in their fields, and

　　(30) this “overcrowding” resulted in women receiving

　　lower wages and men receiving higher wages.