单项选择题

Task 1
Direction: After reading the following passage, you will find 5 questions or unfinished statements, numbered 36 through 40. For each question or statement there are 4 choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should make the correct choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.

Marriage is still a popular institution in the United States, but divorce is becoming almost as "popular". Most American people get married, but at the present time, fifty percent of American marriages end up in divorce. However four out of five divorced people do not stay single. They get married a second time to new partners. Soci61ogists tell us that in the next century, most American people will marry three or four times in one lifetime. Alvin Toffler, an American sociologist, calls this new social form serial marriages, la his book Future Shock, Toffler gives many reasons for this change in American marriage. In modern society, people’s lives don’t stay the same for very long. Americans frequently change their jobs, their homes, and their circle of friends. So the person who was a good husband or wife ten yearn ago is sometimes not as good as ten years later. After some years of marriage, a husband or wife can feel that their lives have become very different, and they don’t share the same interests any more. For this reason Toffler says, people in the twenty-first century will not plan to marry only one person for an entire lifetime. They will plan to stay married to one person for perhaps five or ten years, and then max, another. Most Americans will expect to have a "marriage career" that includes three or four marriages.

The word "institution" (line 1) most probably means ______.

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