Reading Comprehension Check

1. How do you account for the high life expectancy of the Japanese?

2. Is it the same in Belarus? What, in your opinion, should be done to improve

the situation?

3. What are the best ways of increasing lifespan?

Text 2. “FIFTY IS THE NEW THIRTY”

The oldies are coming. By 2020, more than half of all British adults will be over fifty. In a society that celebrates smooth skin, taut muscles and children’s-TV-presenter level of energy, and whose main hope of future economic success is said to lie in creativity and innovation, we will be getting greyer, wrinklier and slower. For the first time in history most of us can expect to get old.

In fact, the over-50s own 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth. They include students, newlyweds, parents of young children, chief executives, government ministers. If we define the old as they have been defined throughout history, as those between 50 and 100-plus, they cover two to three generations and include many of the most eminent, active and affluent people in the country. Even if we put the age limit higher, the same is still true. “Fifty is the new thirty”, claims Andrew Goodsell, chief executive of Saga. Saga has built up a 530- million-pound turnover business from specializing in services (travel, insurance, and publishing) for the over-50s. A thriving third age is not primarily dependent on the number of birthdays passed. People can become decrepit fourth-agers in their sixties, or they can be like Jenny Wood-Allen who at the age of 90 became the oldest woman to complete a marathon. This makes George Bush Snr’s decision to celebrate his 80th birthday by making a parachute jump look almost half-hearted. The multitude of third-agers may be new but longevity itself is not.

Health, clearly, is the single most important ingredient of a good old age. Research proves that lifestyle is more influential than genes in avoiding age-related health collapse. All the vibrant older people I talked to for this article were at least conscious of diet and exercise. Margery Mason, a 92-year-old working actor who has recently written her memoirs, had just swum half a mile when I went to see her at her garden flat in north London. She does it every weekday, except on her recent birthday when she swam a mile by way of celebration. She got her diving certificate the day after her 81st birthday but recently gave up, fed up with how protective people had become of her.

Aging is a little bit like disability, in that a lot of the problems are socially created. People may have slightly more or different needs as they get older, but the key thing is to keep people as human beings, functioning as fully as possible. It is society that imposes on you a sense that you are old. Older workers are commonly thought to be less adaptable, less capable of learning, less creative and less adept at mastering technology. Yet whenever these assumptions have been tested, they have been found to be wrong. Age, as somebody once said, only matters if you are a cheese.

Far from struggling to remember where they put the keys, many in this group are exhaustingly dynamic. I lost count of how many over-60s I came across who were cycling the length and breadth of Britain for charity, or sleeping in Buenos Aires guesthouses so as to learn to salsa properly. Future historians are going to be overwhelmed by material, because every other person seems to be writing a memoir, not necessarily for publication, but because for the first time in history masses of people have enough time, energy and education to try it.

Margery Mason told me she had the most satisfying love affair of her life when she was in her 60s. She is probably not the only one. Perhaps we need to go back to something more like the Middle Ages when a person’s precise age wasn’t always known, when society was less bureaucratized and age wasn’t a basic organizing principle. There will come a time for each of us when we can no longer do what we want. Until then, it makes sense to get on as much as you can.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 871