考研英语阅读理解分享：女儿的报答_大学英语阅读

考研英语阅读理解分享：女儿的报答

　　Now, however, comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a different result. On the basis of the national sample surveys (NSS), they calculate that Indias sex ratio at birth swung from 924 females per 1,000 males in 2004-05 to 977 in 2011, a stunning turnaround in favour of girls.

　　The NSS figure is not comparable to the census. It shows the sex ratio at birth, whereas the census shows the ratio for children aged 0-6 (census figures for the sex ratio at birth have not been published). But there are reasons for thinking the NSS is reliable. The sample size, of 125,000 households, is large. And when the NSS does produce figures comparable to the census, they closely match it (for example, the NSS and census figures for the child sex ratio in 2001 and 2011 are almost identical). The new figure represents a very big change. A sex ratio of 977 girls to 1,000 boys is closer to what prevailed in the 1960s than it is to more recent decades.

　　So it is possible that the sex ratio has begun to change recently in ways not captured by the census. If so, why? Mr Bhalla and Ms Kaur pin the explanation squarely on the behaviour of parts of Indias middle class. What they call the mature middle class, those with an annual income of 170,000 rupees ($3,200) for a family of five, no longer practises sex selection. Ms Kaurs research in five Indian states finds that richer middle-class families are no longer using sons as vehicles for upward mobility. A combination of female education, the spread of modern social attitudes through television, government policies and a dawning sense that daughters are more likely than sons to look after parents in old age are all having a cumulative effect. This is persuading the richer parts of the middle class that girls are as valuable as boys. The authors reckon this slice of the population has almost doubled in size in six years, from 27% in 2005 to 50% in 2011, so its preferences explain the change in the figures.