Demographic indicators show that Americans in the postwar period were more eager than ever to establish families. They quickly brought clown the age at marriage for both men and women and brought the birth rate to a twentieth century height after more than a hundred 【B1】_______ years of a steady decline, producing the 'baby boom.' These young 【B2】_______ adults established a trend of early marriage and relatively large families that went for more than two decades and caused a major but 【B3】_______ temporary reversal of long-term demographic patterns. From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married at a high rate and 【B4】_______ at a younger age than their Europe counterparts. 【B5】_______ Less noted but equally more significant, the men and women who 【B6】_______ formed families between 1940 and 1960 nevertheless reduced the 【B7】_______ divorce rate after a postwar peak; their marriages remained intact to a greater extent than did that of couples who married in earlier as 【B8】_______ well as later decades. Since the United States maintained its dubious 【B9】_______ distinction of having the highest divorce rate in the world, the temporary decline in divorce did not occur in the same extent in 【B10】_______ Europe. Contrary to fears of the experts, the role of breadwinner and homemaker was not abandoned. 【B1】