Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 34 to 40.

The United States had reached a point, in the closing years of the 19^thcentury, when radical improvements in its political, social and economic arrangements were so plainly necessary that they were actually attempted, and therefore may be called inevitable. Women and men, young and middle-aged, rich, poor and inbetween, West, South, and North, all acknowledged the necessity and had some hand in shaping the improvements. It was an epoch very much to the American taste, for it seemed a proof that faith in progress, and particularly in the potential for progress in America was justified. The word 'progressive' had long been afavourite in common speech; now it became attached to a political party, a movement, an era. It remains a curiously empty word, but historians will never be able to do without it. And after all reservations have been made, it would be unfair to deny that the United States did in many respects move forward during this period, did begin to tackle a good many serious problems intelligently. It is a moderately encouraging story.

Big business made itself felt at every state in the progressive story. All the same, it would be a mistake to suppose that business, however profoundly it had shaped and now coloured the day-to-day operations of American life, was the key to progressivism. Nor could the industrial working class, however active, generate the power necessary to dominate the long period. That privilege belonged to the new middle class.

This class had emerged as, numerically, the chief beneficiary of the great transformation of American society. America's rapid development under the impact of industrialism and Urbanisation implied an equally rapidly developing need for professional services. The need for a new order was generally felt, and implied the recruitment and training of new men, and new women, to administer it. Society was now rich enough to pay for their services. Hence, in the last decades of the 19^thcentury, there was a mushroom growth among the professions. Doctors and lawyers, of course; but also engineers, dentists, professors, journalists, social workers, architects. This was the age of the expert; he was given a free hand, such as he has seldom enjoyed since. Each new technical marvel the telephone, the phonograph, the motorcar, the aeroplane - increased the faith that there was a sound technical answer to every problem, even to the problem of government. When a devastating hurricane and flood wrecked the port of Galveston, Texas, in 1901, the local businessmen proclaimed the regular authorities unable to handle the task of reconstruction and handed the city's government over to a commission of experts - a pattern that was to be widely followed in the next few years.

According to the passage, who benefited the most from the changes of American society? A. the new middle class B. the working class C. government officials D. big businesses