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  3. Age has its privileges in America, and one of the more prominent of them is the senior citizen discount. Anyone who has reached

Age has its privileges in America, and one of the more prominent of them is the senior citizen discount. Anyone who has reached

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问题     Age has its privileges in America, and one of the more prominent of them is the senior citizen discount. Anyone who has reached a certain age—in some cases as low as 55—is automatically entitled to a dazzling array of price reductions at nearly every level of commercial life. Eligibility is determined not by one’s need but by the date on one’s birth certificate. Practically unheard of a generation ago, the discounts have become a routine part of many businesses—as common as color televisions in motel rooms and free coffee on airliners.
    People with gray hair often are given the discounts without even asking for them; yet, millions of Americans above age 60 are healthy and solvent (有支付能力的).
    Businesses that would never dare offer discounts to college students or anyone under 30 freely offer them to older Americans. The practice is acceptable because of the widespread belief that "elderly" and "needy" are synonymous (同义的). Perhaps that once was true, but today elderly Americans as a group have a lower poverty rate than the rest of the population. To be sure, there is economic diversity within the elderly, and many older Americans are poor. But most of them aren’t.
    It is impossible to determine the impact of the discounts on individual companies. For many firms, they are a stimulus to revenue. But in other cases the discounts are given at the expense, directly or indirectly, of younger Americans. Moreover, they are a direct irritant in what some politicians and scholars see as a coming conflict between the generations.
    Generational tensions are being fueled by continuing debate over Social Security benefits, which mostly involves a transfer of resources from the young to the old.
    Employment is another sore point. Buoyed (支持) by laws and court decisions, more and more older Americans are declining the retirement dinner in favor of staying on the job—thereby lessening employment and promotion opportunities for younger workers.
    Far from a kind of charity they once were, senior citizen discounts have become a formidable economic privilege to a group with millions of members who don’t need them.
    It no longer makes sense to treat the elderly as a single group whose economic needs deserve priority over those of others. Senior citizen discounts only enhance the myth that older people can’t take care of themselves and need special treatment; and they threaten the creation of a new myth, that the elderly are ungrateful and taking for themselves at the expense of children and other age groups. Senior citizen discounts are the essence of the very thing older Americans are fighting against— discrimination by age.
Which of the following best summarizes the author’s main argument?
选项 A、Senior citizens should fight hard against age discrimination.
B、The elderly are selfish and taking senior discounts for granted.
C、Priority should be given to the economic needs of senior citizens.
D、Senior citizen discounts may well be a type of age discrimination.
答案D
解析 全文围绕“美国老年人享有折扣”展开了论述，谈及此政策所引起的代际冲突，最后表明作者的立场：认为老年人需要更多优先权的观念已不合时宜，老年人享有折扣本质上是年龄歧视。D为本题答案。
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