Skim the texts below and think up a title for each of them. Write down the titles in the blanks before the texts.

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A family is a group of persons united by the ties of marriage, blood, or adoption, constituting a single household and interacting with each other in their respective social positions, usually those of spouses, parents, children, and siblings. The family group should be distinguished from a household, which may include boarders and roomers sharing a common residence. It should also be differentiated from a kindred (which also concerns blood lines), because a kindred may be divided into several households. Frequently the family is not differentiated from the marriage pair, but the essence of the family group is the parent-child relationship, which may be absent from many marriage pairs.

At its most basic, then, a family consists of an adult and his or her offspring. Most commonly, it consists of two married adults, usually a man and a woman (almost always from different lineages and not related by blood) along with their offspring, usually living in a private and separate dwelling. This type of unit, more specifically known as a nuclear family, is believed to be the oldest of the various types of families in existence. Sometimes the family includes not only the parents and their unmarried children living at home but also children that have married, their spouses, and their offspring, and possibly elderly dependents as well; such an arrangement is called an extended family.

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The nuclear, or conjugal, family is the basic unit of family organization in virtually every society. It is generally defined as a married couple and their children (including adopted and fostered children, as well as the couple's natural children). Other forms of family organization, such as compound and joint families, are in a sense built upon the nuclear family or contain units comparable to it in their structure.

In many modern societies the nuclear family is identical to the typical household unit. Members of the nuclear family share the same dwelling place, usually a single house or apartment. In agricultural societies the nuclear family is often the primary unit of production, sharing tasks and taking collective responsibility for the income that sustains them. In both agricultural and other types of communities, the nuclear family is almost always the primary unit of economic consumption. One or both parents, and sometimes children, earn money outside the home and then share at least some of the fruits of their labour with the family as a whole.

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There is no precise distinction between the joint family and the extended family, and the latter term can be used to encompass both. In a narrower sense, sociologists usually think of the extended family as being larger and maintaining less control over its members than does the joint family. In most extended families, the marital bonds between spouses are stronger than the kinship bonds between, for example, the brothers who are the focal people in Indian joint families.

As a household unit, the extended family is most common where ties between kinsmen are important for economic reasons. It was common in Europe during and just after the Industrial Revolution and, more recently, among European immigrant communities outside Europe. It is still common in many parts of the Third World, in both agricultural and industrial contexts, and in Asian communities in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Typically, a group of kinsmen live together and share resources. In a traditional context, there may be common property in the form of agricultural lands, livestock, or ritual property such as sacred objects and sacred sites. These last are important in some African societies and among the Australian Aborigines. In modern societies the extended family offers benefits in areas where government agencies have not penetrated or where essential services are not adequate or not provided. Even where there is no common property, members of extended families may draw on one another when they need financial help.

The term extended family also applies to family units that do not establish a single place of residence. The case mentioned above, of working-class people in London who at least into the 1950s shared domestic chores, is one example. The key aspect of the extended family is not that it necessarily shares the same dwelling or place of residence but that relatives give material assistance to one another and share economic responsibilities.

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