請依下文回答第 16 題至第 20 題 After the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution, a pattern of hiring whole families to work in the new
factories emerged. Although this system meant that the amount of wages necessary for subsistence was kept to a
minimum, it at least allowed the working-class family to stay together. By the middle of the nineteenth century the
practice of hiring families and children was declining, but life for the industrial working class remained oppressive.
The factories and mines were dark, dirty, and dangerous. The dwellings of the workers were likely to be hovels
clustered around smoky, noisy mills or mine entrances. The workers were frequently compelled to spend their wages at
company stores, paying monopoly prices arbitrarily set by the owners. Work lost its dignity. The factory workers were
disciplined to the clock and the machine. The dull, monotonous, robotlike repetition of a single operation on a machine
brought workers none of the satisfaction and pride of skilled craftsmanship. Many historians and social scientists argue that statistics show that the early factory workers received higher wages
and enjoyed a better standard of living than they had ever had as agricultural or urban workers. Clearly, industrial
workers were reaping material benefits from the Industrial Revolution after 1850, but in the years before 1850 workers
may have lost more than they gained. The longer hours, greater insecurity, limits on freedom, and more frequent
unemployment of the uprooted slum-dwelling factory worker of the early nineteenth century do not appear in statistics
of wages and prices. The overall pictures of the industrial proletariat during the first half of the nineteenth century is
dismal and can justly be characterized as a new kind of slavery—slavery to the machine and the machine owner.
【題組】16 When did the system of hiring the whole family to work in the factory start?
(A) After 1850
(B) At the end of the nineteenth century
(C) After the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution
(D) Before the Industrial Revolution