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It has become fashionable to issue dire projections of declining prosperity based on demographic aging. But is that really such

admin2019-09-17  37
问题    It has become fashionable to issue dire projections of declining prosperity based on demographic aging. But is that really such a problem?
   There is no doubt that all countries of the world are getting older, but they are at very different stages of the process. The median age in the United States — with half the population older and half younger — is currently 36. In Ethiopia, it’s 18, owing to a higher birthrate and a lower life expectancy. In other African countries, it’s even lower. The world’s oldest country is Germany, where the median age is 45.
   The pattern is very clear: The young countries are poor, and the old countries are rich. So why do people fear population aging? I see two reasons. The first is psychological: The analogy to individual aging suggests that as populations get older, they grow frail and lose mental acuity. The second comes from economists and an indicator called the dependency ratio, which assumes that every adult below age 65 contributes to society, and everybody above 65 is a burden. And the proportion of people older than 65 is bound to increase.
   Yet we also know that the productivity of some individuals is much higher than that of others, independent of age. Nothing is inherently special about the age of 65. Many people live longer and do so mostly in good health. The saying "seventy is the new 60" has a sound scientific basis. Meanwhile, education has been shown to be a key determinant of better health, longer life and higher productivity (not to mention open-mindedness). The active aging of better-educated populations can be an asset rather than a problem.
   To appreciate how projections based on the simplistic dependency ratio can be misleading, consider the two population billionaires, China and India. In 2050 China’s population will be older than India’s because of its more rapid fertility decline. But so what? China’s population is much better educated and therefore much more productive. Furthermore, only a minority of Chinese will retire at age 65. We can expect most Chinese to make meaningful contributions through work as long as they are in good health, particularly if they find their jobs interesting and satisfying. Again, this is largely a question of education. In India today, one out of three adults has never seen a school from the inside. In China only 8 percent, mostly elderly, have no schooling. In India, 50 percent of young women have less than a junior secondary education; in China, the figure is only 15 percent. Knowing how important education is to economic performance, who would seriously claim that India’s future is brighter than China’s owing to slower aging?
   Population aging is not irrelevant, but it should be seen in conjunction with other dimensions of human capital, especially education and health. Here the prospects are good. In most countries of the world — with the notable exception of the United States — the young are clearly better educated than the old and may thus compensate for their smaller numbers through higher productivity.
   Viewing the quality of human capital as resting on a collection of elements, many of them manageable, is something that the private sector has been doing for a long time. Every sizable business pays attention to human resource management. For governments, the equivalent would be a form of national human resource management that considers education, migration, family, labor, health, and retirement as components that interact richly — and together drive the richness of the future.
What can we learn from Paragraph 2?
选项 A、Ethiopian women are allowed to produce more babies.
B、German people have higher life expectancy.
C、Aging population causes economic recession.
D、Median age refers to the phase of aging.
答案B
解析    比较判断。本段第一句“all countries of the world are getting older，but they are at very different stages of the process”为主题句，段落其余部分以年龄中位数为依据举例说明了这一论点，美国为36，埃塞俄比亚为18，非洲一些国家更低，德国为45，而年龄中位数越大，该国人均寿命越长，因此选项B正确。【知识拓展】题干类似段落大意概括，但选项问的是具体数据。本段的篇章结构为主题句+阐证，所以例证部分为数据比较，可在阅读中勾画数据方便比较。另：第二段第二行末的破折号引出对年龄中位数的解释，即使不懂统计学术语，median为生词，也可以根据补充解释判断其意。
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