20 câu trắc nghiệm Tiếng Anh 11 Global Success Reading đọc hiểu: The Generation Gap có đáp án

 It is generally accepted that teenage is a difficult period of life for the teenagers and even for the parents. Frequent fighting over the most trivial things is one main characteristic of every household with a teenager.

Parents expect their children to come back home earlier. What parents consider the reasonable time limit is not accepted by their teens. Curfew and time restrictions become one of the main reasons for fights.

Teenage is a time when a lot of kids want to show their independence. The problem arises when parents, fearing the safety of their teens, often refuse to give them their own bikes or motorbikes. This, of course, leads to more fights.

A decrease in grades due to increasing difficulty level of school work, newer subjects, more socializing is very common among teens but their parents are not sympathetic. Parents try to impose studying rules and insist that their teens finish their homework before going out. This makes the situation worse.

That children spend too much time on the phone is one complaint that most parents have. The age of smartphones has ensured that kids put their smartphones above almost everything else. Parents, however, worry that teens spending too much time on their phones lose out on family time and real human interaction, besides harming their eyes.

Teenagers develop a taste for unhealthy but delicious fast food, while parents believe that a growing body needs proper nutrition. As cold drinks, burgers and pizzas replace wholesome, home cooked meals, parents worry. Moreover, teenage is a time when kids become more and more conscious of their weight and body image. To achieve the ‘ideal’ thin body type, girls often starve themselves and skip meals. Of course, this also leads to a lot of arguments between parents who try to convince their daughters that proper meals are more important than being thin.

Family conflict

The generation gap, which refers to a broad difference between one generation and another, especially  between young people and their parents, usually leads to numerous conflicts. Such family conflicts can seriously threaten the relationship between parents and children at times. It goes without saying that, however old their children are, parents still regard them as small kids and keep in mind that their offspring are too young to protect themselves cautiously or have wise choices. Therefore, they tend to make a great attempt to help their children to discover the outside world. Nevertheless, they forget that as children grow up, they want to be more independent and develop their own identity by creating their own opinions, thoughts, styles and values about life.

One common issue that drives conflicts is the clothes of teenagers. While teens are keen on wearing fashionable clothes which try to catch up with the youth trends, parents who value traditional clothes believe that those kinds of attire violate the rules and the norms of the society. It becomes worse when the expensive brand name clothes teens choose seem to be beyond the financial capacity of parents. Another reason contributing to conflicts is the interest in choosing a career path or education between parents and teenagers. Young people are told that they have the world at their feet and that dazzling future opportunities are just waiting for them to seize. However, their parents try to impose their choices of university or career on them regardless of their children's preference. Indeed, conflicts between parents and children are the ever lasting family phenomena. It seems that the best way to solve the matter is open communication to create mutual trust and understanding.

Family types vary in different countries and among different cultures. In Western, industrialized societies, the nuclear family ranks as the most common family type. It consists of a father, a mother and their children. But nuclear families exist together with many other types of family units. In the single-parent family, for example, a mother or a father heads the family alone. A blended family is formed when a divorced or widowed parent remarries. As divorce rates have risen, the number of single-parent and blended families has increased.

In many parts of the world, parents and children live together with other family members under the same roof. These complex families usually contain several generations of family members, including grandparents, parents and children. They may also include brothers or sisters and their families, uncles, aunts and cousins. Even when relatives do not live together, they still consider themselves members of the same extended family includes grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.

The American family unit is in the process of change. In the first half of the 20th century, there were mainly two types of families: the extended and the nuclear. An extended family includes mother, father, children and some other relatives, living in the same house. A nuclear family is composed of just parents and children living under the same roof.

As the American economy had progressed from agricultural to industrial one, people were forced to move to different parts of the country to get good jobs. These jobs were mainly in the large cities. Now, in fact, three-quarters of Americans live in urban areas which occupy 2.5% of the national total land mass. Of the 118 million in the labour force, only 3 million still work on the farm.

Since moving for better jobs has often divided the extended family, the nuclear family became more popular. At present, 55% of the families in the US are nuclear families. But besides the two types of traditional family groupings, the family is now being expanded to include a variety of other living arrangements because of divorce. There is an increase in single-parent families, in which a father or mother lives with one or more children. Divorce has also led to blended families, which occur when previously married men and women marry again and combine the children from former marriage into a new family. There are also some couples who do not want to have children to form two-person childless families.