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READING 3 Life One Hundred Years Ago
Two young children with a street vendor in Alton, Illinois, USA, circa 1912
LIFE One Hundred Years Ago
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Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold. 11.5
Most of us are amazed by the rapid pace of technology at the beginning of the 21st century. We often wonder what life will be like 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. But do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you had been alive 100 years ago?
If you had lived around 1900 in the United States, you probably wouldn’t have graduated from high school. Only six percent of Americans had a high school diploma at that time. If you had been a child living in a city, you might have had to work in a factory for 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week. In 1900, six percent of American workers were between the ages of 10 and 15. If you had worked at a manufacturing job, you would have had to work about 53 hours a week and you would have earned about 20 cents an hour. (This is equivalent to about $5.00 an hour today.) Many of you would have worked on farms. About 38 percent of laborers were farm workers.
If you had been a woman in 1900, you probably wouldn’t have been part of the labor force. Only 19 percent of women worked outside the home. If you had gone to a doctor, he probably would not have had a college education. And he wouldn’t have had practical training before becoming a doctor. At that time, medical students learned only from textbooks.
If you had had a baby in 1900, it would have been born at home. If you had gotten an infection at that time, you might have died because antibiotics had not yet been discovered. The leading causes of death at that time were pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis.
What about your home? If you had been living 100 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have had a bathtub or a telephone or electricity. You would have been living with a large number of people. Around 20 percent of homes had seven or more people.
Do you think you would have been happy with life 100 years ago?
