专八英语第3篇：

　　　　　　剩女    Young, Single and What About it

　　In her tiny flat, which she share with two cats and a flock of porcelain owls, Chi Yingying describes her parents as wanting to be the controlling shareholders in her life.  Even when she was in her early 20s, her mother raged at her being unmarried.  At 28, Chi made “the most courageous decision of my life” and moved into her own home.  Now 33, she relishes the privacy —at a price: her monthly rent of 4,000 yuan swallows nearly half her salary.

　　In many countries, leaving the family home well before marriage is a rite of passage.  But in China, choosing to live alone and unmarried is eccentric verging on taboo.  Chinese culture attaches a particularly high value to the idea that families should live together.  Yet ever more people are living alone.

　　In the decade to 2010, the number of single-person households doubled.  Today, over 58m Chinese live by themselves, according to census data, a bigger number of one-person homes than in America, Britain and France combined.  Solo dwellers make up 14% of all households.

　　The pattern of Chinese living alone is somewhat different from that in the west, because tens of millions of (mainly poor) migrant workers have moved away from home to find work in more prosperous regions of China; many in this group live alone, often in shoeboxes.  Yet for the most part, younger Chinese living alone are from or among the better-off.  “Freedom and new wealth” have broken China’s traditional family structures, says Jing Jun of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

　　For the better-educated under-30-year-olds, the more money they have, the more likely they are to live alone.  Rich parts of China have more non-windowed single dwellers; in Beijing a fifth of homes house only one person.  The marriage age rising, particularly in big cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, where the average man marries after 30 and the average woman at 28, older than their American counterparts.  Divorce rates are also increasing, though they are still much lower than in America.  More than 3.5m Chinese couples split up each year, which adds to the number of single households.

　　For some, living alone is a transitional stage on the way to marriage, remarriage of family reunification.  But for a growing number of people it may be a permanent state.  In cities, many educated, urban women stay single, often as a positive choice — a sign of rising status and better employment opportunities.  Rural areas, by contrast, have a skewed sex ratio in which men outnumber women, a consequence of families’ preferring sons and aborting female fetuses or abandoning baby girls.  The consequence in millions of reluctant bachelors.

　　In the past, adulthood in China used to, almost without exception, mean marriage and having children within supervised rural or urban structures.  Now a growing number of Chinese live beyond prying eyes, able to pursue the social and sexual lives they choose.

　　Living alone does not have to mean breaching social norm — phones and the Internet make it easier than ever to keep in touch with relations, after all.  Yet loosening family ties may open up space for new social networks, interest groups, even political aspirations.

　　For now those who live alone are often subject to mockery.  Unmarried females are labelled “leftover women”; unmarried men, “bare branches” — for the family tree they will never grow.  An online group called “women living alone” is tacked with complaints about being to “get a boyfriend”.

[审题思路]

本题探讨的是中国的”剩女”这一社会现象，属于社会生活类话题。题目要求简要概括所给材料中关于”剩女”的观点；并发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开往点题，简要概括材料中的观点；然后提出自己对这一问题产生原因的分析，并给出充分的论据支撑；最后总结全文，重述论点或者升华主题。