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  3. Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents

Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents

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问题     Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents are expected to be roaming in their recreational vehicles or sending postcards of themselves riding camels. Free at last! Women can graduate from the precarious balancing act between parenting and pursuit of a career. That has been the message of my books since I wrote New Passages 15 years ago. What I didn’t see coming was the boomerang.
    With parents living routinely into their 90s, a second round of caregiving has become a predictable crisis for women in midlife. Nearly 50 million Americans are taking care of an adult who used to be independent. Yes, men represent about one third of family caregivers, but their participation is often at a distance and administrative. Women do most of the hands-on care.
    It starts with the call. It’s a call about a fall. Your mom has had a stroke. Or it’s a call about your dad—he’s run a red light and hit someone, again, but how are you ever going to persuade him to stop driving? Or your hushand’s doctor calls with news that your partner is reluctant to tell you: it’s cancer.
    When that call came to me, I froze. The shock plunges you into a whirlpool of fear, denial, and feverish action. You search out doctors. They don’t agree on the diagnosis. You scavenge the Internet. The side effects make you worry. You call your brother or sister, hoping for help. Old rivalries flare up.
    We’d like to think that siblings would be natural allies when parents falter. But the facts are quite different. Brothers bury their heads in the sand. The farther away a sister lives, the more certain she will call the primary caregiver and tell her she doesn’t know what she’s doing. A 1996 study by Cornell and Louisiana State universities concluded that siblings are not just inherent rivals, but the greatest source of stress between human beings.
    There are many rewards in giving back to a loved one. And the short-term stress of mobilizing against the initial crisis jump-starts the body’s positive responses. But this role is not a short race. It usually turns into a marathon, averaging almost five years. But most solitary caregivers will wait until the third or fourth year before sending out the desperate cry "I can’t do this anymore!"
The word "boomerang"(boldfaced in Paragraph 1)refers to______.
选项 A、husbands and wives giving different care to their weak parents
B、women in their fifties taking all responsibilities for their families
C、the elderly becoming dependent on their middle-aged children
D、family caregiving having been shifted onto women’s shoulders
答案C
解析 文中第一段提到“What I didn’t see coming was the boomerang”，即我没有预料到随后发生的事却事与愿违。随后文中第二段阐明了后面发生的事，即对于中年女性来说，随着父母活到90多岁，照顾老人已成为一场可预见的第二轮危机。将近5 000万的美国人正在照顾曾经能自理的成年人。据此可知，单词boomerang指的是老年人越来越依赖他们的中年子女。C项正确。
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