?Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage:

In a family where the roles of men and women are not sharply separated and where many household tasks are shared to a greater or lesser extent, notions of male superiority are hard to maintain. The pattern of sharing in tasks and in decisions makes for equality and this in turn leads to further sharing. In such a home, the growing boy and girl learn to accept equality more easily than did their parents and to prepare more fully for participation in a world characterized by cooperation rather by the “battle of the sexes”.

If the process goes too far and man’s role is regarded as less important—and that has happened in some cases—we are as badly off as before, only in reverse.

It is time to reassess the role of the man in the American family. We are getting a little tired of “Monism”—but we don’t want to exchange it for a “neo-Popism”. What we need, rather, is the recognition that bringing up children involves a partnership of equals. There are sings that psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and specialists on the family are becoming more aware of the part men play and that they have decided that women should not receive all the credit—nor the blame. We have almost given up saying that a woman’s place is in the home. We are beginning, however, to analyze man’s place in the home and to insist that he does have a place on it. Nor is that place irrelevant to the healthy development of the child.

The family is a co-operative enterprise for which it is difficult to lay down rules, because each family needs to work out its own ways for solving its own problems.

Excessive authoritarianism (命令主義) has unhappy consequences, whether it wears skirts or trousers, and the ideal of equal rights and equal responsibilities is pertinent (相關的，切題的) not only to a healthy democracy, but also to a healthy family.

16. The ideal of equal rights and equal responsibilities is .

A. fundamental to a sound democracy

B. not pertinent to healthy family life

C. responsible for Monism

D. what we have almost given up

17. The danger in the sharing of household tasks by the mother and the father is that .

A. the role of the father may become an inferior one

B. the role of the mother may become an inferior one

C. the children will grow up believe that life is a battle of sexes

D. sharing leads to constant arguing

18. The author states that bringing up children .

A. is mainly the mother’s job

B. belongs among the duties of the father

C. is the job of schools and churches

D. involves a partnership of equals