更多"Population ageing has become a worl"的相关试题:
[填空题]The world has never seen population ageing before. Can it cope Until the early 1990s nobody much thought about whole populations getting older. The UN had the foresight to convene a "world assembly on ageing" back in 1982, but that came and went. By 1994 the World Bank had noticed that something big was happening. In a report entitled "Averting the Old Age Crisis", it argued that pension arrangements in most countries were unsustainable.
For the next ten years a succession of books, mainly by Americans, sounded the alarm. They had titles like Young vs Old, Gray Dawn and The Coming Generational Storm, and their message was blunt: health-care systems were heading for the rocks, pensioners were taking young people to the cleaners, and soon there would be intergenerational warfare.
Since then the debate has become less emotional, not least because a lot more is known about the subject. Books, conferences and research papers have multiplied. Whether all that attention has translated into sufficient action is another question. Governments in rich countries now accept that their pension and health-care promises will soon become unaffordable, and many of them have embarked on reforms, but so far only timidly. That is not surprising: politicians with an eye on the next election will hardly rush to introduce unpopular measures that may not bear fruit for years, perhaps decades.
The outline of the changes needed is clear. To avoid fiscal meltdown, public pensions and health-care provision will have to be reined back severely and taxes may have to go up. By far the most effective method to restrain pension spending is to give people the opportunity to work longer, because it increases tax revenues and reduces spending on pensions at the same time. It may even keep them alive longer. John Rother, the AARP"s head of policy and strategy, points to studies showing that other things being equal, people who remain at work have lower death rates than their retired peers.
Younger people today mostly accept that they will have to work for longer and that their pensions will be less generous. Employers still need to be persuaded that older workers are worth holding on to. That may be because they have had plenty of younger ones to choose from, partly thanks to the post-war baby-boom and partly because over the past few decades many more women have entered the labour force, increasing employers" choice. But the reservoir of women able and willing to take up paid work is running low, and the baby-boomers are going grey.
In many countries immigrants have been filling such gaps in the labor force as have already emerged (and remember that the real shortage is still around ten years off). Immigration in the developed world is the highest it has ever been, and it is making a useful difference. In still-fertile America it currently accounts for about 40% of total population growth, and in fast-ageing western Europe for about 90%.
On the face of it, it seems the perfect solution. Many developing countries have lots of young people in need of jobs; many rich countries need helping hands that will boost tax revenues and keep up economic growth. But over the next few decades labor forces in rich countries are set to shrink so much that inflows of immigrants would have to increase enormously to compensate: to at least twice their current size in western Europe"s most youthful countries, and three times in the older ones. Japan would need a large multiple of the few immigrants it has at present. Public opinion polls show that people in most rich countries already think that immigration is too high. Further big increases would be politically unfeasible.
To tackle the problem of ageing populations at its root, "old" countries would have to rejuvenate themselves by having more of their own children. A number of them have tried, some more successfully than others. But it is not a simple matter of offering financial incentives or providing more child care. Modem urban life in rich countries is not well adapted to large families. Women find it hard to combine family and career. They often compromise by having just one child.
A. Intergenerational conflicts will intensify.
B. need large numbers of immigrants from overseas
C. People should be allowed to work longer.
D. They find it hard to balance career and family.
E. the current pension system in most countries could not be sustained in the long term
F. The employers are unwilling to keep older workers
G. politicians are afraid of losing votes in the next electionIn its 1994 report, the World Bank argued that ______.
[单项选择]Nationally, an ageing population is a problem. But locally it can be a boon. The over-50s control 80% of Britain"s wealth, and like to spend it on houses and high-street shopping. The young "generation rent", by contrast, is poor, distractible and liable to shop online.
People aged between 50 and 74 spend twice as much as the under-30s on cinema tickets. Between 2000 and 2010 restaurant spending by those aged 65-74 increased by 33%, while the under-30s spent 18% less. And while the young still struggle to find work, older people are retiring later. During the financial crisis full-time employment fell for every age group but the over-65s, and there has been a rash of older entrepreneurs. Pensioners also support the working population by volunteering: some 100 retirees in Christchurch help out as business mentors.
Even if they wanted to, most small towns and cities could not capture the cool kids. Mobile young professionals cluster, and greatly prefer to cluster in London. Even supposed meccas like Manchester are ageing: clubs in that city are becoming members-only. Towns that aim too young, like Bracknell and Chippenham, can find their high streets full of closed La Senzas (a lingerie chain) and struggling tattoo parlours.
Companies often lag behind local authorities in working this out. They are London-obsessed, and have been slow to appreciate the growing economic heft of the old—who are assumed, often wrongly, to stick with products they learned to love in their youth. But Caroyln Freeman of Revelation Marketing reckons Britain could be on the verge of a marketing surge directed at the grey pound, "similar to what we saw with the pink". The window will not remain open forever: soon the baby boomers will start to ail, and no one else alive today is likely to have such a rich retirement.
Meanwhile, with the over-50s holding the purse strings, the towns that draw them are likely to grow more and more pleasant. Decent restaurants and nice shops spring up in the favoured haunts of the old, just as they do in the trendy, revamped boroughs of London. Latimer House, a Christchurch furniture store full of retro clothing and 1940s music, would not look out of place in Hackney. Improved high streets then entice customers of all ages.
Indeed, gentrification and gerontification can look remarkably similar. Old folk and young hipsters are similarly fond of vinyl and typewriters, and wander about in outsized spectacles. Some people never lose their edge.The ageing population can be locally a boon in Britain in that ______.
A. old folks hold 80% of Britain"s wealth
B. older people spend more money on high-street shopping
C. older people tend to buy big houses than rent houses
D. the elderly like shopping online
[单项选择]Which state has the largest population
[填空题]Which country has the largest online population
[单项选择]
The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31 as the day the world will be home to 7 billion people.
For better and worse, it’s a milestone.
And there will be more milestones ahead. Fourteen years from now, there are expected to be 8 billion people on the planet. Most of the growth will occur in the world’s poorer countries. Proportionally, Europe’s population will decline, while Africa’s will increase. At around the same time, India will overtake China as the most populous nation on Earth.
The growing global population is just one side of the coin. A recent report from the World Health Organization signaled the seriousness of the human population explosion: more than 3 billion people—about half the world’s population—are malnourished. Never before have so many, or such a large proportion, of the world’s people been malnourished.
And in a growing number of countries, there is a seemingly un
A. be a poorer country
B. be the most populous country
C. decline in population
D. increase investment in Africa
[单项选择]The city has a dense manufacturing population.
A. 这个城市工业人口稠密。
B. 这个城市制造业密集人口众多。
C. 这个城市有为数众多的密集制造业。
D. 这个城市有一个稠密的工业人口。
[填空题]
China has the largest population of young netizens in the world, but they turn to the Internet mostly to play games.
Step into any Internet caf in China and you are bound to see this sight: rows of young faces, their eyes fixed on computer screens, earphones over their heads, their fingers moving rapidly on the keyboards. A chorus of mouse clicks provides the background music.
The Research Report on Internet Entertainment Trends of China’s Youth, issued by the Institute of Public Governance of Renmin University of China, may shed some light on the Internet caf scene. The report, which was released during the 2005 China Youth and Entertainment Forum last September, outlines how the country’s young people entertain themselves. The top three activities are online entertainment (39.9%), sports (18.3%) and watching television (12.3%).
While blogs, or personal Web logs, have drawn a lot of media attention as a major focus of Internet use, it is clear
[填空题]
Philanthropy
It has become an American tradition that those who attain great wealth return some of it to the public through philanthropy. An early example of this was the generosity of Amos Lawrence of Massachusetts, a wealthy merchant who in the 1830s and afterwards contributed much money for famine relief in Ireland. He also donated generously to educational and other humanitarian causes.
In the early years of the twentieth century several men who had amassed vast
(1) likewise became great philanthropists. Andrew Carnegie, an exceptionally energetic man,
(2) has begun working twelve hours a day when he was only fourteen years old,
(3) one of the world’s richest men by pioneering in the steel
(4) . After his retirement in 1900 he devoted his time and his wealth to the
(5) of free public libraries. He also set up foundations for medical research and
(6) world peace.
