Whenever you see an old film, even one made as little as ten years before, you can?t help being strucked by the __1__ appearance of the women taking part. Their hair styles and make-up look date; their skirts look either too long or too __2__ short; their general appearance is, in fact, slightly ludicrous.
The men taking part, on other hand, are clearly recognizable. __3__ There is nothing about their appearance to suggest that they belong to an entire different age. This illusion is created __4__ by changing fashions. Over the years, the great minority of men __5__ have successfully resisted all attempts to make it change their __6__ style. of dress. The same cannot be said for women. Each year,a fewer so-called top designers in Paris and London lay down __7__ on the law and women around the world run to obey. The __8__ decrees of the designers are unpredictable and dictatorial.Sometime they decide arbitrarily, that skirts will be short and __9__ waists will be height; hips are in and buttons are out. __10__
Pretty in pink: adult women do not rememer being so obsessed with the colour, yet it is pervasive in our young girls’ lives. Tt is not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year-olds, between girls as not only innocent but as evidence of innocence. Looking around, I despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests.
Girls’ attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies, it is not. Children were not colour-coded at all until the early 20th century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses.When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine colour, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolised femininity. It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children’s marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem inherently attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.
I had not realised how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kins, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts developed after years of research into children’s behaviour: wrong. Turns out, acdording to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularised as a marketing trick by clothing manufacrurers in the 1930s.
Trade publications counselled department stores that, in order to increase sales, they should create a “third stepping stone” between infant wear and older kids’ clothes. Tt was only after “toddler”became a common shoppers’ term that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. Splitting kids, or adults,into ever-tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences – or invent them where they did not previously exist.
By saying "it is...the rainbow"(Line 3, Para.1),the author means pink______.
A. should not be the sole representation of girlhood
B. should not be associated with girls&39; innocence
C. cannot explain girls&39; lack of imagination
D. cannot influence girls&39; lives and interests