综合英语教程第三版第⼆册Unit15课⽂
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.
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 安全黑板报
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.
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.
多肉的形状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 pe
祖国至上ople 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.
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
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.员工考核表模板
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, from 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.
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The revolution has two aspects. First, we are not producing babies like we ud to. In just a generation, world fertility has halved to just 2.6 babies per woman. In most of Europe and much of east Asia, fertility is clor to one child per woman than two, way below long-term replacement levels. The notion that the populations of places such as Brazil and India will go on expanding looks misplaced: in fact, they could soon be contracting. Meanwhile, except in a handful of AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa, people are living longer everywhere.
This is frightening, even for rich nations. In Germany, France and Japan, there are fewer than two taxpaying workers to support each retired pensioner. In Italy, the figure is already fewer than 1.3. Some predict that the world will face a wave of "ageing recessions".
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But could there be an upside? I believe so. Flip the coin of ageing and what do we e? In 1965, The Who sang: "Hope I die before I get old." Today, tho who survived drugs binges, fast cars, or bad marriages, are older, but often still rocking and making more u of condoms than colostomy bags. Mick Jagger (born 1943) is nobody's idea of a dependant. And Tina Turner took to the stage in London, dancing in heels and a microskirt in her 70th year.
Non-celebrities also remain active, asrtive and independent as they age. They
fill library and minar halls once crammed with callow youths. They run picket lines — or marathons. Far from being a weight round society's neck, many of them look like a new human resource waiting to be tapped. Millions of the middle-class retired continue working at everything from lucrative consultancies to teaching literacy or finally finishing that PhD. They are often more valuable than the young workers the demographers imagine are supporting them: in fact, the growing number of society's most qualified, most experienced individuals is potentially a huge demographic dividend.
In future, old people will be expected to stay in the formal economy for longer. The idea of a retirement age was invented by Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s, when as chancellor of Germany he needed a starting age for paying war pensions. He cho the age of 65 becau that was typically when ex-soldiers died. But today in developed countries, and soon in poorer ones, women can expect nearly 30 years of retirement, and men 20 years.
There is a deal to be done: longer working in return for more, and more powerful, legislation to outlaw the ageism that blights the working lives of many in late middle age. The old will also expect a society that does not marginalize them; they will consider it a right to live in homes, cities and workplaces redesigned to meet their physical requirements.
Some worry that an older workforce will be less innovative and adaptable, but there is evidence that companies with a decent proportion of older workers are more productive than tho addicted to youth. This is sometimes called the Horndal effect, after a Swedish steel mill where productivity ro by 15 percent as the workforce got older. Age brings experience and wisdom. Think what it could mean when the Edisons and Einsteins of the future, the doctors and technicians, the artists and engineers, have 20 or 30 more years to give us.
Of cour, many older people do need healthcare, but many others are fit, competent and lf-sustaining. Across Europe, typically only one retired person in 20 lives in a care home. In the UK, of 10 million over-65s, just 300,000 live in care homes (that's about 3 percent). So the majority of Europe's elderly remble Okushima in Japan. They are the councillors and counllors, the social cretaries and neighbourhood wardens, the carers of other elderly people, and even the political and social campaigners and agitators — the glue that holds busy societies together. Far from impoverishing societies, says John MacInnes, a demographer at the University of Edinburgh, UK, all the evidence is that "mass longevity facilitates affluence". The "silver market" is huge. You have only to watch US network television to e the constant advertising aimed at the elderly, from Viagra and holidays to equipment and leisure wear. Oldies have savings and cash from lling large hous the
y no longer need. The money is available for purchas and investment — and ultimately for their children.
But this is not fundamentally about economics or retirement. It is about society's zeitgeist, its social wellsprings. The cultural historian Theodore Roszak at California State University, East Bay, once took me to task over an article on the threat of ageing
societies: "Ageing," he wrote, "is the best thing that has happened in the modern world, a cultural and ethical shift that looks a lot like sanity."
At 50, we do not expect to act or feel as we did at 20 — nor at 80 as we did at 50. The same is true of societies. What will it be like to live in societies that are much older than any we have known? We are going to find out, becau the ageing of the human race is one of the surest predictions of this century. If the 20th century was the teenage century, the 21st will be the age of the old: it will be pioneered by the ageing baby boomers who a generation ago took the cult of youth to new heights. Without the soaring population and so many young overachievers, the tribal elders will return. More boring maybe, but wir, surely.
The older we are, the less likely we are to be hooked on the latest gizmos and the more we should a
ppreciate things that last. We may even reduce pressure on the world's resources by consuming less, and by conrving our environment more. We
must especially hope for that, becau unless the boomers can pay reparations for youthful indiscretions with the planet's limits then we may all be doomed.城市的变化作文
The 20th century did great things. We should be proud that for the first time most children reach adulthood and most adults grow old. But after our exertions, perhaps we need to slow down a bit. Take a breather. Learn to be older, wir and greener. Doesn't sound so bad, does it?
