写作素材老年人口比例增加对社会的影响

1、写作素材：老年人口比例增加对社会的影响美国学者the American Scholar文章这个文章我选来,是因为雅思作文中有关于老年人口比例增加对社会影响的题目A Country for Old MenHaving reached the shores of seniority himself, the author finds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees接近老年 reach the shores of seniority发现.认为.find.in the eyes of .退休的人retirees作者

2、 :By Edward HoaglandMore and more Ive been concluding that by middle age most people in this country have sculpted their lives so theyll land about where they aimed to.(在这个国家)很多人在中年的时候就已经把自己的生命雕刻成形,所以他们很快到达自己既定的目的地.注意本句子中by.后面主句是将来时间,完成状态The few who genuinely aspired to be rich or famous will probab

3、ly become so for a spell, and those who wished for comfortable stability will find themselves with tradecraft competence, a web of friendships, grandchildren.少数真正梦想发财成名的人会成功一阵子,而那些希望过着安逸稳定生活的人就会发现自己子孙满堂,(无所事事,就上网,于是就)具备侦探一样的技术能力,(用这种技术能力)有一堆网友.括号内的增添内容,是我根据原文增补的,这样似乎更容易理解.The pleasures of versatilit

4、y are their own reward for well-rounded folk, much like committing a couple of decades to the responsibilities of raising kids.花上几十年养儿育女versatility 灵活多样well-rounded folk 多样的民族You acquire traction and smile lines, with perhaps a well-grooved marital banter.这个句子的翻译我没有谱.不好理解well-grooved marital banter是

5、什么意思,不熟悉语言的文化场景)Two by two, Noahs Ark is said to have been boarded-pairings being the easiest equation for many of us to handle, after all.And in an era of chaotic governance and commonplace mendacity and meltdown, the ambition to excel seems a bit stunted. Hoe your own row is more the message than

6、grabbing for a brass ring, though self-expression_r can become as crosswise as the old childrens game of pick-up sticks. While the country splits, compounding its fractures left to right, we accommodate ourselves to zany loads of debt, outlandish overcrowding-trading trains for planes, for example,

7、till both are drastically less fun and the roads alternatively an anthill, as blue-collar as well as white-collar families look for a hideaway, a second home.In pick-up sticks the player plucks colored sticks singly from a pile of 40 dropped helter-skelter on the table, down to the last, but without

8、 ever displacing any he isnt immediately after; if he does, the other player takes over, himself attempting to score. It resembles negotiating traffic, or the ballet of the sidewalk, threading throngs. Pedestrians finesse potential collisions by swinging slightly sideways, smiling distantly, parting

9、 the phalanx by body-language adjustments. Theres nature; and then for phenomena like crowds, our second nature.Homey imperatives such as steering kids through school, wage haggling, and good-neighborliness keep us from obsessing about what may be unraveling elsewhere: that plus our widened sense of

10、 travel-Florida, Calabria, Pata?gonia, Indonesia. There can be a knockabout anomie to shuttling around, and the density of our egos remains a problem, the clamoring holler to build McMansions. People wished to flaunt their first million, nibbling holes in any town, and our tribalism historically has

11、 wanted the other guy clamped underneath a heel, not just to stay in his own valley. Though tribalism lies in shards in this global epoch, the shards are still sharp, when you consider that nearly 3,000 New Yorkers, dying in an act of war earlier in this decade, received a thousand times as much att

12、ention as the five million or so killed in Congos wars.A cross-stitch of mercenary and sexual greed has marked the opening of the new century, plus a flight toward cyber-reality, which is to say the notion that I think, therefore I am. Such an idea has seemed absurd to me since I was in college, tak

13、ing a first philosophy course but spending part of each day outdoors, where the seethe of life still swamped merely thinking about it. It continues to, or every library or movie or chatroom screen. We are dragging our anchors, whatever they happen to be-landscape or literary, folklore or ethical. Di

14、ck Tracy, Natalie Wood, and Babe Ruth morph into Sweeney Todd, Britney Spears, and Barry Bonds. The new fluidity, air-conditioned, unhinged from nature, cracks open opportunities for entrepreneurial idealism as well as greed, perhaps, in response to rolling famines, flood zones, mud zones, and the s

15、calped forests and subsiding aquifers. Youngish activism rather than rootless self-exploration. The dwindling contexts that we operate in-whether its water tables, tree cover, religious deference, historical reference, family continuity-makes for a kind of Queen of Hearts croquet, where the wickets,

16、 balls, and mallets all dash around in goofy, friendly-fire exchange. When Biology eventually has her say it may no longer simply be something, like cancer, we fight against; there may be hell to pay; the gamble is how much we can destroy without triggering an abyss of consequences. Extinctions-do t

17、hey matter more than aesthetically? A warming climate? We truly dont know whats about to become the bottom line of that. And will the damage remain as constrained as along an avalanche track, or be multiplex? You might as well ask Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Appleseed, outdoorsmen both. If they there

18、upon sniffed the wind and looked for birds-What happened? Is no space left?-and you showed them instead the marvels inside a digital box, would they feel reassured that democracy had worked?It has in the sense that I dont know a lot of older Americans who didnt get just about what they genuinely sou

19、ght. Most of course set the bar pretty low-from modesty, timidity, inconsistency, indifference-or else were pursuing normalcies like love and family, children, friends and sports, which good humor can obtain without one doing too well on exams or achieving the stratospheric business success that ris

20、ks a Humpty Dumpty fall. Life is going to go okay when rapport serves as well as sleepless ambition and if the person can weather the occasional divorce or job loss. Indeed, we seem to be engineered for it, and our setting the bar customarily low explains why human nature, human history, dont signif

21、icantly improve. Yet by not expecting much, most of us age with considerable contentment-Ive been noticing lately at senior-center lunches and church suppers-and even die with a bit of a smile, as I remember was often the case during a year I worked in a morgue in my 20s. In that era I might hitchhi

22、ke across the country with a $20 bill for emergencies tucked into my shoe, whereas half a century later, when in reality I go almost nowhere, I carry at least a thousand in cash in my wallet about this small town where I live.Why? To bribe the Grim Reaper or maybe merely an EMT as a cushion against

23、indignity? In theory it could purchase the freedom to flag down a taxi and hire a ride of a thousand miles, or enable me to give away tons of money impulsively (not that thats in the cards either). As your legs lose their spring, money becomes mobility, whether locally or to change the climate for a

24、 season. Money can lend woof to lifes warp if the weeks grow monochromatic-greenbacks are salad once you have filled the freezer and the furnace or looked for tolerable old-age accommodations. Women with their own careers can move out comfortably on an exasperating husband, like men seeking an autum

25、nal bachelorhood. Nearly any mothers son descends into a constricted level of activity before buying the farm, as the saying goes. However, people dont need to join the faithful minority who acknowledge a spiritual presence in their daily rounds to make life work for them. The sunrise blazes as trum

26、pet-colored for the doubters, and nothing prevents them from swinging their young sons and daughters up to straddle their shoulders for the morning strut to school. They can smile up their sleeves at the absurdities of the workplace, as much as any churchgoer, and wind up rather like that particular

27、 grandparent one is especially fond of.Weve got the option of duplicating qualities we admired growing up, like the generosity of a certain teacher, the loyal, lifelong craftsmanship or professional affiliations of another. Balance tends toward moorage in a safe harbor-and perhaps that smile in old

28、age on a gurney. Ive seen famine in Africa, Asian poverty, deaths in my own family, but never regarded life as not worth living for mine or other species. In hardship we squint a while, but green and cerulean are the colors of the world and lift our spirits by and by, with energy the syrup of life-w

29、hich is why Ive loved cities so much, Cairo and Calcutta as well as Paris and New York. Once weve abandoned the notion of channeling Elvis or Einstein to whittle a stance for ourselves, our quotient of contentment is likely to rise. I have public benches on Main Street to sit on or can walk around t

30、o the library, not to mention the county courthouse, where I sometimes rubberneck on trial days, observing the sorrowful mishaps individuals blunder into, imagining that maybe a lady wishes to see their private parts or that shoplifting wouldnt piss off a storekeeper. The parade-ground regimentation

31、 of the legal system after an arrest is dwarfed by the byzantine tangle of rituals regarding sex and property it regulates.I was too afraid of women as a youngster to bumble into trouble by crossing forbidden boundaries. Before then, scared enough by the Sunday school story of the boy Benjamin, in G

32、enesis, chapter 44, ensnared because a stolen silver cup has been deliberately planted in his belongings, that I never committed the petty thefts of candy or whatnot my classmates did. But coveting was not a major problem for me. Nor did I later want a jumbo car or house. Cultivating anonymity was b

33、etter for a writer whose bread and butter was asking questions and watching others inconspicuously. With a few exceptions the masterpieces I admired had not been written by authors of peacock fame. Publishing what I wrote and keeping it in print was my aim, which over the decades I managed to do-as,

34、 without feeling like a Pollyanna, Im inclined to think that others, in different avenues, often parallel. Not so many put all of their eggs in one basket, but that quotient rivals mine. I rarely meet somebody over about 30 who has set his sights upon a goal so front and center that he might irrever

35、sibly fail. Instead we retool, reinvent, ourselves. Like a bird twitching its wings or a fish its tail, we switch directions in order to upgrade our prospects. Engineers describe becoming marketing executives, science teachers turn to employment as corporate chemists (or vice versa), a backhoe opera

36、tor is licensed for real estate appraisals, a truck driver puts on a troopers uniform, an office manager launches a business of her own, pumping out proposals. My father recalibrated his legal career after being refused a partnership at the firm where he had worked his first 10 years; and in my 30s

37、I realized my aptitudes were better suited to essay writing, after publishing three early novels. Flexibility is the stuff of life. Life is an arc.At those senior lunches, church suppers, midmorning diner confabs, I hear retirees chatting about the trajectory of their lives, deepening the smile line

38、s they already have. Hindsight logic seems half the fun. Who would have guessed youd end up selling clothes, or as a custom carpenter or court clerk? Theres no exaggerating the role patience may play in living well, or wearing a coat of the proverbial many colors-bold caution and humorous solemnity.

39、 Youve talked to children and to the military, yet sometimes held your tongue, except about McCarthyism and Guantanamo. Balderdash still wins votes for popinjays, but the lag period when an environmental rescue effort, for example, can be mounted has shrunk alarmingly, voiding the chances for a new

40、president to put the glaciers and rain forests back together or reduce sea flooding, restore the vanished galaxies of species. We prefer a president who mirrors us-a lowbrow braggart when were in that mood, or a gallant and humane man for World War II and the Marshall Plan. Our frame of mind does ne

41、ed repair, but thats been true for a thousand years.Pudgy, we sit in the senior center occasionally recounting the deathsof our spouses, round robin, for solace. How one was trying to lift his legs off the bed when the embolism took him-or a womans heart failure, starting on the toilet, that crumple

42、d her at the sink-and my mother, a long-term stroke victim trying to speak, whose eyes seemed to beg for death, after she could no longer swallow without choking. But was she possibly asking something else?-she wasnt able to write. Agewise, we may all be in the same boat, and yet a healthy sprinklin

43、g of us have wrinkle lines denoting repose: not chewing over grievances or kicking ass, even our own. Instead, we enjoyed a good run and now could be an advertisement for lifes beneficence, if the word doesnt mean you cant also die of thirst in the desert. You might, but we exerted ourselves not to.

44、Doing what comes naturally should prevent your children from feeling estranged even if at some point you did get divorced; and keep you from beaching broke on the shoals of old age, unless you never shed a dice-or-drink addiction; and dissolve some of your midlife mortgage anxiety. Paying out mostly

45、 balances out, and the kids who ought to land in college eventually make it there. I believed in theory that character is fate but have been surprised a bit, firsthand. Not to find that hustlers beat nice guys, but that it doesnt matter; they come a cropper, as you can read like newsprint in their f

46、aces; the length of life unstrings them. I can go to an Ivy League alumni reunion and meet posh fund managers who either wish they had pursued a degree in ornithology instead of finance or are fretting about a tax shelter gone gravely awry, not to mention a painful mismarriage. An auditor disqualifi

47、ed the shelter and a judge is divvying up their assets as if to provide for their stepchildren as well as the wife: is that fair? Although grads at the Ivy gathering got a head start over nine-tenths of the folks at the senior-center lunch, long before their seventh decade the effects of early privi

48、lege had petered out, at least according to the emanations of contentment versus discontent at each location. George Orwells last notebook jotting observed that at 50, everyone has the face he deserves. (Sadly, he didnt make it to that age.) And I tend to agree, especially if you advance the criteri

49、on to the white-hair phase, when a thousand accumulating decisions at first defined and then achieved our goals. If subliminally we wanted to be couch potatoes, we are-or exercised a real green thumb, cooked delicious pasta, and mastered the organ in the corner church. Perhaps there was a mountain i

50、n the Adirondacks whose profile stirred us to drive the Alaska Highway, and later we threw lire into the Trevi Fountain, raised Belgian shepherds, adopted a three-month-old child to enlarge our family, worked in wholesale. Whatever the destination, it turned out not to be Phil Rizzutos or Phil Donah

51、ues or whoever we idealized originally. Lifes gauge was broader than we anticipated. Not in the sense that we batted in Yankee Stadium or chatted up celebs like Montgomery Clift; but our aims multiplied and vicarious satisfactions punctuated our days. A snatch of Scott Joplin on the radio (we dont n

52、eed to have composed to exult); a daughter on a winning basketball team; a seagull, surplice-white but primeval in posture, that lands on the lawn to grab food left for the dog.A certain self-selection of course takes place in who shows up for the monthly Mens Breakfast at the senior center, for ins

53、tance-I sat with an ex-harbormaster and ferryman and a crane operator-or college reunions. Welfare clients arent as likely as pensioners to come, and loners stay away, or the more deeply discouraged and unmoored. Among the Ivies, high-flying alumni who can talk about which prep school their children

54、 got into and about financial derivatives sit together, not with their classmates bemoaning the inequities of health and luck. Veterans who 50 years ago decided not to use the GI Bill to earn a college degree wound up with solid businesses and nest eggs, too, if they wished for that and followed thr

55、ough. But following through does not determine contentment if they also wanted beer chums or love liaisons that might derail their concentration yet engrave those smile lines people wear when reclining on their final gurney. Sly pleasures will do it, as well as the daily straight and narrow and a life of kids dashing around on summer evenings.Integrity is rarer and doesnt tell on the face as clearly because, unlike pleasure, integrity involves cost-consciousness, even for the honest soul whose