Question 21 is based on the recording you have just heard.

Recording Two

听力原文

    Free-market capitalism hasn’t freed us—it has trapped us. It’s imperative for us to embrace a workplace revolution. We are unlikely to spend our last moments regretting that we didn’t spend enough of our lives slaving away at work. (19) We may instead find ourselves feeling guilty about the time we didn’t spend watching our children grow, or with our loved ones, or travelling, or on the cultural or leisure pursuits that bring us happiness. Unfortunately, the average full-time employee in the world works 42 hours a week, well over a third of the time we are awake. Some of our all too precious time is being stolen: office workers do around two billion hours of unpaid overtime each year. So it is extremely welcome that some government coalitions have started looking into potentially cutting the working week to four days.

    The champions of free market capitalism promised their way of life would bring us freedom. But it wasn’t freedom at all: from the lack of secure, affordable housing to growing job insecurity and rising personal debt, the individual is trapped. (20) Nine decades ago, leading economists predicted that technological advances and rising productivity would mean that we’d be working a 15-hour week by now: that target has been somewhat missed.

    Here is the most malignant fret to our personal freedom, particularly as the balance of power in the workplace has been shifted so dramatically from worker to boss. A huge portion of our lives involves the surrender of our freedom and personal autonomy. (21) It’s time in which we are directed by the needs and desires of others, and denied the right to make our own choices. That’s bad for us: it is hardly surprising that over half a million workers suffer from work-related mental health conditions each year, or that 15.4 million working days were lost to work-related stress last year, a jump of nearly a quarter.

    Yes, there are those who, far from being overworked, actually seek more hours. But a shorter working week would enable us to redistribute hours from the overworked to the underworked. We need to look at ways of cutting the working week without slashing living standards: after all, the world’s workers have already suffered the worst deduction in wages since the early 1800s. And cutting the working week would be conducive to the individual, giving millions of workers more time to spend as they see fit.

21. What is the result of denying workers’ right to make their own choices?

解析：C。录音中后面部分说到，我们处于一个没有自主选择权的时代，这对我们很不利，接着举例说这一情况造成的后果，即每年有超过50万的劳动者患上精神方面的疾病，C项表述符合此内容，因此选C。原文中只是提到更短的工作周将使我们能够重新分配工作时间，并不是说工作时间的不平等分配是后果，故排除D项。A、B两项在原文中未提及，故排除。