雅思阅读 181: The Generation in Waiting（等待中的一代）

改编从 ILO Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 / OECD Education at a Glance 2025。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2026-08/35066_PDFA_Web_ENG.pdf

Reading Passage

A. The acronym "NEET" — Not in Employment, Education or Training — was coined in Britain in the late 1990s to replace an earlier term that had acquired a pejorative edge. It has since become one of the most powerful measures of what a society is doing with its young people. The group it describes is easy to define but hard to characterise: a NEET is simply a person of working age who is neither earning a wage nor acquiring a formal qualification. Within that neutral category sit young carers raising younger siblings, new parents who have left school, graduates who cannot find work, school-leavers who never connected with the labour market, and people who have simply dropped out of view. The category was designed to be broad because the problem it measures is broad: a society that fails to integrate a substantial fraction of its 18-to-24-year-olds is wasting not only their working lives but their formative ones, when skills, habits and social networks are built. It also wastes the years of schooling already invested in them, because the social return on education is realised only when that education meets a job.

B. The global picture, set out in the International Labour Organization's 2026 report on youth employment trends, has darkened after a brief recovery. The share of young people worldwide in NEET status, which had fallen gradually in the decade before the pandemic, rose to about 20 percent in 2025, up from 19.7 percent in 2023. That increase of 0.3 percentage point sounds small; applied to a youth population of more than a billion, it meant nine million additional young people in NEET status since 2023, bringing the global total to 257 million. The gender split remains stark. Young women are roughly twice as likely as young men to be out of work and out of education, a gap driven by unequal expectations about care work, restricted access to credit and property, and — in some regions — legal and cultural barriers to female employment. The ILO's report notes that this gap has narrowed slightly since the 2000s but has barely moved in the last five years.

C. Within the rich countries of the OECD, the picture is more varied and, in some respects, more encouraging. NEET rates among 18-to-24-year-olds are now below pre-pandemic levels in about half of member countries, and the OECD average sits at roughly 13 to 14 percent. Yet the aggregates conceal enormous regional inequalities. Within individual countries, the OECD found that the NEET rate in the best-performing region could differ from the worst-performing region by as much as thirteen percentage points on average — and far more in parts of southern Europe and Mexico. A young person growing up in a former industrial town, in a remote rural area, or in a deprived neighbourhood is not merely less likely to find work; they are less likely even to be in the classroom that might lead to work. Geography, in other words, has become destiny in a way that national averages hide.

D. The consequences of prolonged NEET status accumulate in ways that are hard to reverse. Economists call it "scarring": a first spell of unemployment between the ages of 18 and 24 has been shown, in study after study, to depress wages and employment prospects for at least a decade, even after the young person eventually finds work. The mechanism is not mysterious. The first job is where work habits are formed, where references are earned, where a school-leaver learns how to present themselves to an employer. A young person who spends two or three years out of the labour market has fewer references, weaker networks and a gap on their CV that employers read with suspicion. They also have, on average, worse mental health: surveys consistently link prolonged inactivity among the young to anxiety, depression and a sense that the future has narrowed. The damage is not only economic; it is the slow erosion of the confidence that allows people to take the risks on which working life depends. A generation that enters adulthood through a long spell of inactivity tends, decades later, to report lower life satisfaction, weaker civic participation and a smaller circle of friends — effects that show up long after the employment gap itself has closed.

E. Policy responses have converged, with varying success, on a model called the Youth Guarantee. Originating in the Nordic countries and adopted European-wide after the 2008 crisis, the idea is simple: every young person, within a few months of leaving education or losing work, is offered a job, an apprenticeship or a training place. Spain's version, the Youth Guarantee Plus plan, launched in 2021, was evaluated midway in 2025 and found to have reduced NEET rates modestly — but the country's share of under-30s not in education, employment or training still stood at 16.1 percent, well above the OECD average and almost double the European Union's 9 percent target. The lesson of these evaluations is not that guarantees fail, but that they work best when they are joined to something larger: decent vocational education, active job-placement services, and a macroeconomic environment in which employers are actually hiring. A guarantee, however well designed, cannot conjure jobs that the broader economy is not producing. For the 257 million young people in NEET status worldwide, the problem is not lack of goodwill; it is that the bridge from school to work, built over two decades of economic growth, has not yet been rebuilt to carry the generation that came of age through pandemic, inflation and uncertainty. Whether that bridge is widened in time will shape the political and social character of the 2030s as surely as postwar reconstruction shaped the decades that followed it.

Questions 1-4

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

List of Headings i. What NEET means and why the category matters ii. The global picture after a brief recovery iii. Within the OECD: averages that hide regional divides iv. How prolonged inactivity leaves a lifelong "scar" v. Youth Guarantee policies and their limits vi. Why vocational education is unpopular vii. The history of British labour law

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. Why was the term NEET introduced? A. To label young people as lazy. B. To replace an earlier term that had acquired negative connotations. C. To measure unemployment among pensioners. D. To describe students in higher education.

6. What did the ILO report find about global NEET rates in 2025? A. They had fallen to 15 percent. B. They rose to about 20 percent, adding 9 million young people since 2023. C. They were identical to male and female rates. D. They dropped below pre-pandemic levels everywhere.

7. What does the OECD's regional analysis show? A. NEET rates are identical across regions. B. Within countries, best- and worst-performing regions can differ by around 13 percentage points. C. Rural areas always have the lowest NEET rates. D. Geography has no effect on NEET status.

8. What is "scarring"? A. A physical injury caused by unemployment. B. The long-term depression of wages and prospects caused by early unemployment. C. A medical condition affecting young workers. D. The loss of vocational skills.

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. Young women are roughly twice as likely as young men to be NEET globally.
10. The OECD average NEET rate for 18-24-year-olds is about 30 percent.
11. A first spell of unemployment at age 18-24 can depress wages for at least a decade.
12. Spain's Youth Guarantee Plus achieved the EU's 9 percent target in 2024.
13. NEET young people are more likely to have university degrees than employed youth.

Questions 14-15

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

The ILO reported that global NEET status reached about 20 percent in 2025, bringing the total to 257 million young people. The Youth Guarantee model, originating in the Nordic countries, offers every young person a job, apprenticeship or training place within a few months. Evaluations show it works best when linked to decent (14) __________ education, active placement services, and a macroeconomy in which employers are actually (15) __________.

答案与解析

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