Unit 15 The aging population
The few hours I spent at the "Wonderful Ageing Club", a small organization hidden away down a side street in Tokyo, were, it has to be said, rather depressing. For I was transformed, rather too quickly I thought, from a relatively healthy 36-year-old to an 80-year-old, and, dresd in the club's "ageing suit", growing old did not em like a wonderful prospect at all.学生感悟
First, I had to put on restrictive bindings to impede the movements of my main joints. Then a contraption was placed over my ankle and foot, riously hampering my ability to move my foot independently of the rest of my leg. Similar bindings were then applied to my knees and elbows, and it was with some gratitude that, now unable to move normally, I accepted the kind offer of a walking stick. The ladies of the Wonderful Ageing Club, however, were still far from finished. Assuring me that their suit had been carefully designed on the basis of scientific rearch into the exact effects of ageing, they next applied a pair of special gloves to my hands to make gripping much more difficult.
Thus finished, it took me quite a few minutes before I managed to open a can of Coke — a dexterity test which, I should add, I was only able to begin after I had managed to locate the ring-pull in the first place. My vision had grown rather clouded as a result of my special glass, which had the effects of cataracts.
A number of weights were attached to my body to create the nsation of weakened muscles, and a pair of earplugs muffled my hearing. This completed my imprisonment in a body more than twice my own age. At this point, eager to e as well as feel the effects of all this ageing engineering, I looked into a nearby mirror and found mylf staring at what I can only describe as an evil in the Star Wars films.
社会实践怎么写There, however, any similarity with powerful science-fiction heroes, living or dead, abruptly ended. For now I found mylf clumsily hobbling my way through such newly difficult tasks as going up and down stairs, sitting down on a chair and then standing up again, or reaching for things on a high shelf. Not to mention wrestling with that can of Coke or struggling, through my cataract-clouded vision, to read a newspaper.
But what is the purpo of this ageing suit? The Wonderful Ageing Club claims that it gives a very accurate reprentation of what being old is really like, and that, when it comes to planning for the future, that experience will be of enormous value. And people are evidently listening: about 8 000 people have tried the suit on so far, and half of them have been from local authorities, manufacturing companies or emergency rvice providers. They hope to e whether the products or rvices they offer really do meet the needs of the elderly.
空气化学Thus, throughout Japan, all kinds of products, from houhold appliances, to cars, to building designs, right down to the packaging in which goods are sold, are being subjected to an entirely new kind of test: they are being handled by an imitation pensioner dresd up in an ageing suit to e just how practical the products really are. No longer, it ems, is it going to be a young person's world. Not, at any rate, in the Japan of the 21st century.
Read more: The Shock of the Old关于春天的现代诗>Equis
麻将牌>坚强后盾
叶子怎么剪Ushi Okushima is the oldest resident of Ogimi, the most elderly community in Japan — the country where the average age is higher than anywhere el in the world. At 108, she still takes to the floor for traditional Japane dances. Afterwards she dabs a little French perfume behind her ears and sips the local firewater. Okushima was born when Japan had only recently en off the shogun warlords. If an ageing population is on the way, she is not a bad advert for what we have in store.
The land of the rising sun has become the land of the tting sun with staggering speed. As recently as 1984, Japan had the youngest population in the developed world, but by 2005 it had become the world's most elderly country. Soon it will become the first country where most people are over 50 years old.
This is partly becau Japane people live longest: men can expect to reach 79 and women 86. It is also partly becau the Japane have almost given up having babies: the fertility rate is just 1.2 children per woman, far lower than the 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population. The rest of the world is following Japan's example. In 19 countries, fr
om Singapore to Iceland, people have a life expectancy of about 80 years. Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Meanwhile, women around the world have half as many children as their mothers. And if Japan is the model, their daughters may have half as many as they do.
Homo sapiens is ageing fast, and the implications of this may overwhelm all other factors shaping the species over the coming decades — with more wrinklies than pimples, more walking frames than bike stabilirs, more slippers and pipes than bootees and buggies, and more grey power than student power. The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every houhold. It promis to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.
