The Female Life Expectancy is Advantageous to Social Security Program One of the great advances of 20th century was increase

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问题          The Female Life Expectancy is Advantageous to Social Security Program
    One of the great advances of 20th century was increased life expectancy. This advance might have bankrupted Social Security, if it were not for women in the work force.
    When the Social Security program was created in the 1930s, life expectancy was 60 years,as compared to 75 years in the 1980s and 78 years today. With 1930s life expectancy, a great number of people were expected to pay Social Security taxes while they worked, but never live long enough to ever collect benefits. The early planners of the system understood that the prior contributions of the now-deceased were one way that a retiree could collect more in benefits than he paid in taxes.
    Although there are still some Americans who work, pay taxes, and then die before collecting Social Security benefits, this life cycle is much less common than it used to be. Thus you would think that Social Security would have had a huge deficit years ago.
    Once they turn 62 years old, married people, widows and widowers are eligible for Social Security, regardless of whether they ever worked for pay during their lifetimes. When Social Security was in the planning stages, it was expected that most working-age couples would have only one person working (and thereby paying the payroll tax)—typically the husband. Yet when these couples retired, Social Security would pay benefit checks to both of them as long as they lived. Thus, a payroll tax rate was planned that could bring in enough revenue from working men to pay both the retired men and the retired women.
    History did not quite turn out that way. In fact, millions of married women worked for pay and paid the payroll taxes as they did. This was largely profit for the Social Security system, because the system would have paid those women benefits regardless.
    The revenues of governments in the future will depend just as much on how women spend their time. Governments can expect more revenue if women continue significantly with their labor market progress, and less revenue if some of women’s payroll gains are reversed in the years ahead.
Why does the author say "this advance might have bankrupted Social Security" ?

选项 A、More people would collect benefits from Social Security due to the longer life expectancy now.
B、Only one person of a couple works and pays the payroll taxes, but both collect benefit checks.
C、Fewer people die before they are entitled to collect Social Security benefits.
D、More and more women without work get benefits from Social Security.

答案A

解析 推理判断题。根据题干定位到文章第1段:One of the great advances of 20th centurywas increased life expectancy.This advance might have bankrupted Social Security,if it were not for women in the work force.说明预期寿命的延长使得社会保险有破产的危险,而恰恰是劳动力中有女性的存在,才使得社会保险不至于破产。文章第5段进一步说明女性对社会保障体制的作用,是不会导致其破产。
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