I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room—a women’s group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don’t talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement. He gestured toward his wife and said, “She’s the talker in our family.” The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. “It’s true,” he explained. “When I come home from work, I have nothing to say. If she didn’t keep the conversation going, we’d spend the whole evening in silence.”

    This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.

    The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed—but only a few of the men—gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year—a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.

    In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: “He doesn’t listen to me.” “He doesn’t talk to me.” I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.

    In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

答案精析：本题可以直接定位至原文最后一段，该段以描述一个典型的漫画场景再次强调了当前这种婚姻危机：一个男人坐在早餐桌旁，一边吃饭一边埋头看报纸，而他的妻子怒视着报纸的背面，想要和他说话。作者在最后一段，非常简要的描述了这幅经典漫画的场景，对前文内容做了一个小结。根据文章逻辑可推断出，作者在接下来的段落中很可能会针对漫画所暗示的内容展开进一步的描述，故正确答案为B。

错项排除：A、C、D三项中的Divorce Talk、high divorce rate和Andrew Hacker出现在原文第三、四段，并且该段也对这三项内容也做了较为详细的解释，而且在最后一段中也并未再提到有关divorce（离婚）和Andrew Hacker的内容，如果接下来的段落还接着讨论离婚或者Andrew Hacker的话，无法和最后一段内容做承接，故A、C、D三项错误。

长难句分析：In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

本句主干为…the image…is the stereotypical cartoon scene…，主系表结构。that引导定语从句，修饰image。of a man…, while a woman…为后置定语，修饰cartoon scene，用于对漫画场景进行具体描述。

句意为：简而言之，最能形象地描绘目前这种危机的是一个典型的卡通场景：一个男人坐在早餐桌旁，一边吃饭一边埋头看报纸，而他的妻子怒视着报纸的背面，想要和他说话。