anywhere before the eighteenth century. Any figures
indicating a nation's military and economic power were
guarded as state secrets, like the maps of newly
discovered passages through dangerous waters to
distant ports. The ancient population counts among
the Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, Persians, Romans,
and Japanese were apparently aimed toward taxable
people and property, and men of military age. A
different kind of accounting was the goal in the earliest
recorded comprehensive census of a population and
its food supply, which was taken in Nuremberg,
Germany, in 1449, when the town was threatened by a
siege. The town council ordered a full count of all the
mouths to be fed and an inventory of the food supply,
but the results were kept secret and did not become
public until two centuries later.
Public numbers are a modern by-product of
new ways of thinking about government, wealth, and
security. Representative governments have required
periodic public censuses of population in order to
determine representation. The framers of the
Constitution of the United States pioneered in this
area by providing for a national census every ten
years. Established in 1790, the United States census
is the oldest continuous periodic census done by a
nation and has served as a model for the institution
elsewhere. The proposal for a ten-year census was
not the first census proposal made in the United
States. In 1776 during the American Revolution, the
committee working on a preliminary body of laws
for the new nation proposed the requirement of a
census every three years. These early lawmakers
understood the importance of the census even then.
Today, the periodic United States census is used to
determine the number of members from each state in
the House of Representatives, one of the two houses
of the United States Congress.
87. Click on the sentence in paragraph 2
that mentions the specific way in
which the census influences
representation in the United States
government.
因為這一題沒有答案，所以想請問各位意見...
我選劃紅色部分，大家覺得呢？
