雅思课外读物--What work looks like for 50s women?

摘要：今天要跟大家分享的雅思阅读素材题目是What Work Looks Like for Women in Their 50s?女人过50，工作是怎样？50岁？50岁都还没有退休呢吧？文章到底是要告诉我们什么，一起来看看吧！

However, there’s some evidence that suggest men and women may be on different trajectories during this decade. While the rates of both marriage and divorce have been steadily falling among the educated in the US for a couple of decades, both have been shooting up among the post-50s cohort. Women are the drivers here; two-thirds of people leaving decades-long marriages are women. As they hit their career peaks, they are looking for supportive partners – or no partner – that will allow them to flex their full potential. The men these women married often had classic, linear careers and are very ready to slow down… just as their wives’ careers take off. “[The husbands] are exhausted, having given their all for decades. They just want to play golf,” is how one executive described it to me.

But why does everyone need to follow the same career path anyway? Wouldn’t it make good sense for partners who have children to have complementary(互补的) career cycles? Smart young couples will want to plan more holistic, dual career families, rather than individual ones, where each partner could have a slightly different, but mutually supportive, pacing. One partner could run the 30-to-50 sprint, the other a longer marathon.

Women (and a few pioneering men) who took a momentary career plateau in their 30s to be parents often thought they were harming their prospects. But if they re-accelerated in their 40s, and found companies willing to keep them on a career track, they find that they are now being offered prime career opportunities in their 50s and later. There is nothing new here. Felice Schwartz argued for flexibility back in 1989, and Anne-Marie Slaughter has updated the argument for this century. It’s just that the numbers and pressure keep growing as women become a majority of the educated workforce – and men push to be more involved parents.

Women have traditionally been the primary parent, although this is changing as countries and companies begin to replace maternity leave with the more gender balanced parental leave, allowing parents to sort out their own care and career choices. In the meantime, an ever-growing wave of highly educated and highly skilled women are re-emerging the other side of the family crunch, more ambitious than ever. Some companies are becoming flexible enough to enable their (relatively) late blooming, tapping into a potent new force in global business. For these smart, innovative employers, the silver decades may yield gold.

Vocabulary

accelerate 加速 (=speed up)

head-hunt 猎头

sustainable 可持续的

non-linear 非线性的

plateau 平原

propel 推动(=push forward)

row 排;争吵

complementary 互补的

Words in IELTS reading

The government needs to create sustainable, competitive and diverse farming and food sectors, which will contribute to a thriving and sustainable rural economy, and advance environmental, economic, health, and animal welfare goals.(剑7T2P2)

参考译文：政府有必要设立可持续性、有竞争力和多样化的农业及粮食生产部门，这会为农村经济的繁荣和可持续发展做出贡献，并加快实现环境、经济、健康以及动物福利方面的目标。

Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, there emerged an awareness in Western societies that resources for the provision of fossil fuel energy were finite and exhaustible and that the capacity of nature or the environment to sustain economic development and population was also finite.(剑4T4P3)

参考译文：因此，在20世纪50年代和60年代，西方社会意识到，化石燃料能源的供应资源是有限的，并能被耗尽，自然界或环境维持经济发展和人口增长的能力也是有限的。

The ambitious objective can only be fully achieved by 2090, but proposed measures are nonetheless a first essential step towards a sustainable transport system which will ideally be in place in 3D years’ time, that is by 2040.(剑10T1P2)

参考译文：这一宏伟目标到2090年才能完全实现，但是被提议的措施是建设一个持续的交通体系的关键第一步，这将在30年后完全实现，也就是2040年。

The first approach would consist of focusing on road transport solely through pricing. This option would not be accompanied by complementary measures in the other modes of transport.(剑10T1P2)

参考译文：关注交通运输的第一个办法就是通过价格。这个办法并不会与其他的交通方式相互补充。