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The way things are looking, the royal family will need to start bulk buying

游客2023-12-21  7
问题     The way things are looking, the royal family will need to start bulk buying birthday cards. When King George V sent the first telegrams to those celebrating their 100th birthday in 1917. he only had to fire off 24. Last year, his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth sent 6,405 cards to centenarians in the UK. Her grandson will be signing a lot more, based on forecasts suggesting that today’s 10-year-olds have a 50% chance of living to at least 103. This rising longevity has come under the election campaign spotlight.
    The focus on the costs of an ageing society continued in a recent warning from the World Economic Forum (WEF) that the retirement age in Britain and other developed countries must rise to 70 by 2050 to head off a pension crisis. The WEF is right that there are huge cost implications from demographic fact that a longer life is harder to fund for the individual and state cannot remain a taboo subject. But what is missing from the debate is how a longer life is also a source of opportunities. Our society remains largely ageist: too quick to write people off and too narrow-minded about life after 60.
    Gerontologist Sarah Harper highlighted this last week when she called for a change to the way we talk about age. People should not be called old until they were seriously frail, dependent and approaching death. Anything else should be called "active adulthood". This raises the key point that people no longer cease work in their 60s expecting to enjoy only a short retirement before they die. Instead, those who get the state pension will on average spend almost a third of their adult life in retirement. But despite this seismic shift, we are still structuring life in three stages-childhood, work, retirement. What’s more, the ages at which each stage begins have barely budged in decades.
    It is this damaging fixation with a three-stage life that Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott explore in their book The 100-year Life. Their research in psychology and economics feeds into a work that is a mixture of self-help for those who want to make more of being younger for longer and a manifesto for how firms and policymakers can adapt to rising longevity. "What is striking is the contrast between the magnitude of change that society will embark upon as people live longer, and the relatively limited response from corporations and governments," they write. "Saying that corporates and governments are ’behind the curve’ doesn’t even come close." The authors concede that living longer will mean most people will have to work longer. But that is not necessarily as bad as it sounds. We simply need to think more creatively about how work can change and how we can change over a longer multi-stage life. That could mean working at a different pace at different stages, changing path more often or taking sabbaticals.
    On top of the longevity factor, our working lives will also be shaped by rapid technological changes. Such developments as robots and online banking are already forcing people to adapt how they work and in some cases to retrain. For some workers, robots are already stealing their jobs. But here again, a longer life offers opportunities to adapt to those pressures. Given that across a 100-year lifespan there are 873,000 hours available and if, a specialist expertise takes 10.000 hours to acquire, mastery in more than one field is neither daunting nor impossible. It’s an alluring image; a world where people can take time out to retrain, their skills are valued and nurtured by their employers.
    So how do we get there? Employers and policymakers can start by doing more to help the current cohort of over-50s to stay in work if they want to. There are almost a million 50-to 64-year-olds who are not in employment but willing to work. Today employers are not making use of a whole pot of untapped talent and experience. This urgently needs to change. It is said by 2020, one in three UK workers will be over 50 and employers will have to retain retrain and recruit those older people. One solution is to redefine older workers’ roles so they become mentors to younger recruits.
    Employers must move away from the current model where they centre so much of their training on new, young recruits. The onus is also on the government to offer more and better education throughout people’s lives. That must include financial education to help people cope with the increased choices a longer life will impose. And this education must be readily available to all. Similarly, healthcare and welfare will need to evolve so that everyone can benefit from rising longevity. Otherwise as The 100-year Life authors point out life risks being "nasty, brutish and long for those unable to afford the kind of self-reinventions and sabbaticals that a longer life would ideally entail. It’s a life that is hard to imagine as long as we remain stuck in our learn-work-retire model. But instead of just squabbling over care costs, pensions and retirement ages, isn’t it time we ditched that old way of living and saw rising longevity for what it is? More time to do more things. [br] Explain the sentence "Saying that corporates and governments are ’behind the curve’ doesn’t even come close. " (para.4)
选项
答案 behind the curve: a figurative expression / the sentence used to describe the attitude and response of companies and governments facing rising longevity / as people live longer, the society will confront enormous changes ("the magnitude of change that society will embark on") / but the corporations and governments do not respond actively ("relatively limited response") / their attitude and response are far from meeting the great changes brought by the rising longevity / a criticism of the attitude of companies and governments / "narrow minded"
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