TEXT D The citizens of France are
once again taking a pasting on the op-ed pages. Their failing this time is not
that they are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as they were thought to be during
the invasion of Iraq, but rather that they voted to reject the new European
Union constitution. According to the pundits, this was the timid, shortsighted
choice of u backward-looking people afraid to face the globalized future. But
another way of looking at it is that the French were simply trying to hold on to
their perks—their cradle-to-grave welfare state and, above all, their cherished
35-hour workweek. What’s so bad about that There was a time
when the 35-hour workweek was the envy of the world, and especially of
Americans, who used to travel to France just so they could watch the French
relax. Some people even moved to France, bought farmhouses, adjusted their own
internal clocks and wrote admiring, best-selling books about the leisurely and
sensual French lifestyle. But no more. The future, we are told,
belongs to the modem-day Stakhanovites, who, like the famous Stalinist-era coal
miner, are eager to exceed their quotas: to the people in India, say, who
according to Thomas L. Friedman are eager to work a 35-hour day, not a 35-hour
week. Even the Japanese, once thought to be workaholics, are mere sluggards
compared with people in Hong Kong, where 70 percent of the work force now puts
in more than 50 hours a week. In Japan the percentage is just 63 percent, though
the Japanese have started what may become the next big global trend by putting
the elderly to work. According to figures recently published in The Wall Street
Journal, 71 percent of Japanese men between the ages of 60 and 64 still work,
compared with 57 percent of American men the same age. In France, needless to
say, the number is much lower. By the time they reach 60, only 17 percent of
Frenchmen, fewer than one in five, are still punching the clock. The rest are
presumably sitting in the cafe, fretting over the Turks, Bulgarians and
Romanians, who, if they were admitted to the European Union, would come flooding
over the French border and work day and night for next to nothing.
How could the futurologists be so wrong George Jetson, we should
recall—the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday
become—worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in
1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that
we wouldn’t know how to spend it. Who does the word "Stakhanovites" refers to according to the passage
A.Those that are of Russian origin. B.Those Russian workers. C.Those exceedingly hardworking ones. D.Those socialists.