IELTS Reading 151: The World Is Getting Older

Adapted from UNFPA / UN Office at Geneva / IMF (Bloom, 2025). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://www.unfpa.org/8billion/8trends

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Reading Passage

A. Not long ago, the great demographic worry was the opposite one. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, experts warned of a population bomb: humans were reproducing so fast that the planet could not feed them. The global average then was nearly five children per woman. That figure has fallen steadily ever since. By 2022 it stood at roughly 2.3 children per woman, and the United Nations projects it to reach about 2.1 — the rate at which, over generations, a population simply replaces itself — before 2050. The numbers are deceptive in only one respect: the world as a whole is still growing, because people are living longer. But beneath that growth a quiet reversal has already happened. More than sixty percent of humanity now lives in countries where women have fewer children than the replacement rate. The new anxiety is no longer crowding but emptiness: a world, that is, with fewer young people and many more old ones. The shift has happened faster than most policies designed around it — pension systems, hospitals, schools — were built to expect.

B. That shift is visible as a changing shape of populations. The number of people aged sixty-five and over worldwide is projected to more than double, from roughly 760 million in 2021 to about 1.6 billion by 2050. Put plainly, a great bulge in the age distribution is moving, decade by decade, toward the older end. The arithmetic of support then becomes uncomfortable. Each retired person draws a pension and consumes health care that has to be paid for by the taxes of the working population; as the ratio of retirees to workers climbs, either pensions must shrink, working people must pay more, or retirement must begin later. Countries such as Italy, Japan and Germany are already living with this arithmetic, and many others are queuing up behind them. Pensions and health systems designed when a worker supported a small number of pensioners now have to support a much larger one. The problem is not that older people deserve less; it is that the arithmetic of contribution and support has quietly inverted, and no one has yet written the new equation down.

C. The economic case for alarm goes deeper than pensions. Fewer births mean, eventually, fewer workers, savers and consumers entering the economy. A shrinking or stagnant workforce raises the risk of slower growth, unless each worker becomes dramatically more productive. Some economists worry about an even subtler loss. New ideas — the kind of research, invention and entrepreneurship that drives long-run progress — come from people, and a famous recent paper argued that a permanently smaller cohort of young researchers could mean a slowdown in the supply of new ideas themselves. On this view, low fertility does not merely squeeze public finances; it may quietly dull the engine of innovation. Add the shrinking demand that comes from fewer households forming, and it is easy to see why many commentators speak, with barely disguised panic, of demographic decline. Panic, however, is not the same as analysis, and the very certainty with which some forecasters predict contraction often conceals how much depends on choices not yet made.

D. Before prescribing remedies, it is worth asking why families are smaller. The striking finding in survey after survey is not that people want few children. Most say they would like two or more, yet end up having one, or none. The gap between desired and actual family size points away from a simple change in taste and toward the cost of children in the modern world. Housing in successful cities has become extraordinarily expensive; the time and career sacrificed by parents, above all mothers, when children arrive is large; and a modern career rewards continuous participation in ways that make taking years out punishingly hard. Higher education and rising labour-market opportunities for women have given them more control over their own lives — a triumph of autonomy that nevertheless, when combined with the price of space and time, shows up as lower fertility. The choice, in other words, is rarely made freely in isolation; it is made inside an economy that prices children expensively. This is why simply telling people they ought to have more children has so little purchase: it ignores the very real costs, paid chiefly by women, that lie between desire and a third birth. Housing alone, in the most successful cities, can swallow a family's margin for an extra child whole, before the first baby is even born.

E. Yet a senior United Nations economist has argued recently that the alarm may itself be misplaced. A smaller population, she points out, does not have to mean a poorer one, because output depends not only on heads but on what each head produces. Better-educated, healthier workers can more than offset fewer of them, and the same women whose lower fertility worries pension funds are also, on average, the most educated and productive the world has ever known. The genuine task, on this view, is not to scare people back into having children — a strategy some governments have pursued with cash bonuses that have so far had only small effects — but to make work, care and later life compatible: affordable childcare, flexible careers, and systems that treat older people as resources rather than burdens. Framing falling fertility as a crisis, the UN warns, also risks blighting the very achievements — longer lives, smaller families, women's freedom — that produced it. The world is getting older; whether that becomes a problem, or a manageable and even welcome change, depends far less on the birth rate alone than on how societies choose to respond. A country with more robots, better medicine and women free to work may be an older one but not necessarily a poorer one; the statistics are forecasts, not fate.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The changing shape of populations ii. Why the economic alarm may be overstated iii. Beyond pensions: workers, savers and new ideas iv. Why families actually have fewer children v. How to encourage more immigration vi. The history of the population-bomb panic vii. Why pensions were invented

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What was the global average number of children per woman in the 1950s? A. About 2.3. B. Nearly five. C. About 1.6. D. About 2.1.

6. By about how much is the number of people aged 65 and over projected to grow between 2021 and 2050? A. It will halve. B. It will roughly double. C. It will stay the same. D. It will fall by 90%.

7. According to some economists, why might low fertility harm innovation? A. It reduces the pool of young researchers and potential new ideas. B. It makes it harder to teach children to read. C. It causes computers to break. D. It raises the price of patents.

8. What do most surveys find about how many children people want? A. They want no children at all. B. Most would like two or more. C. They want ten or more. D. They are indifferent.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. More than sixty percent of humanity lives in countries below replacement fertility.
10. Most people surveyed report wanting many fewer children than they actually have.
11. Cash bonuses so far have had only small effects on birth rates.
12. Immigration is now the main cause of falling fertility worldwide.
13. Women's rising education and labour-market opportunities are mentioned as a relevant factor.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The number of people aged sixty-five and over is projected to rise from 761 million in 2021 to about (14) _____________ billion in 2050. According to the UN, output depends on both the number of workers and their (15) _____________.

Answers & Explanations

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