雅思阅读 91: Japan's Lesson in a Long Life（长寿社会的日本经验）

改编自 OECD Economic Surveys: Japan 2024 / 日本内阁府。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/en/publications/oecd-economic-surveys-japan-2024_41e807f9-en/full-report/component-5.html

Reading Passage

A. Japan is the oldest country on Earth, and it knows it. In 2024, just under thirty per cent of its population was aged sixty-five or over, and one in six was seventy-five or older. Life expectancy stood at about eighty-five years, and roughly ninety-five thousand Japanese citizens had reached one hundred. By 2065, the government projects, the proportion over sixty-five will approach thirty-nine per cent, and the number of working-age people available to support each elderly person will have fallen to roughly one. That Japan reached this point before any other wealthy democracy is not, by itself, a tragedy. Longevity is, after all, a success story: a country where people routinely survive into their nineties is a country whose diet, sanitation, vaccination systems and public health measures have worked. But a country in which a shrinking cohort of workers must pay for, nurse and carry the pensions of a rapidly growing cohort of the very old is a different kind of challenge — one that no existing social contract was designed to handle. The arithmetic is unforgiving: fewer taxpayers, more claimants, and a medical system whose costs rise fastest exactly where the population is oldest. Japan is, in effect, the first society to run the experiment, and the rest of the wealthy world, which is moving in the same direction, is watching.

B. The speed of the shift is what sets Japan apart. In 1950, the proportion of elderly was around five per cent, a figure typical of a young, fast-growing society. It rose to fourteen per cent in the early 1990s and to twenty per cent barely a dozen years later — the first country ever to cross that threshold. Most European economies are taking roughly twice as long to make the same transition. The rural-urban gap compounds the pressure. In Tokyo, young people still arrive from the provinces to study and work; in depopulated villages on the southern islands and in the north, half the residents can be over sixty-five, schools have closed for lack of children, and small hospitals stand half-empty beside long-term care wards that are full. The national statistics, in other words, conceal a patchwork in which some neighbourhoods have aged decades faster than the country as a whole. Any policy designed in Tokyo has to be tested against the reality of a mountain village where the youngest nurse is fifty.

C. Japan's most famous institutional response is its long-term care insurance system, introduced in 2000. Before then, care for the frail elderly was a patchwork of family provision and hospital beds, and many elderly patients lingered for months in acute-care wards at public expense. The insurance scheme forces everyone aged forty and over to contribute, allows anyone over sixty-five to apply for assessed care, and offers a menu of services — home visits, day care, assisted bathing — that users choose for themselves. The ambition was to move care out of hospitals and into communities, and to treat the elderly as customers with choices rather than as patients lying in beds. Alongside it, the government has built a "community-based integrated care system" that clusters medical, nursing, preventive and housing services within the walkable distance of a neighbourhood, so that an eighty-year-old who can no longer drive does not have to leave the district they have lived in for decades.

D. A second, quieter reform has been to keep older people in the labour force. A 2021 revision of the law on the stable employment of elderly workers obliges employers to make one of five choices, the most common of which is to raise the age at which workers can continue drawing their salary to seventy. Many companies now retain skilled older workers on reduced contracts rather than pension them off at sixty. The principle behind the shift is broader than keeping GDP up. Policy documents now speak of shifting support away from an age-based entitlement — everyone over seventy gets help — toward a function- and income-based one: healthy, affluent older people are expected to contribute, and benefits are concentrated on those who actually need them. It is an awkward bargain, because it asks people who worked for forty years and were promised retirement to think of themselves instead as a resource. The political risk of breaking the implicit contract is real; the fiscal risk of not reforming it is larger.

E. Whether Japan's model can travel is an open question. Its elderly are among the healthiest in the world, its families still provide more care than official statistics capture, and its public debt, though enormous, is mostly held by its own citizens, which gives the government unusual room to borrow. Most other ageing societies do not share all three advantages. South Korea, Italy and Germany are moving toward the same demographic cliff faster than Japan did, but with less land mass, weaker family support, or larger external debts. China, whose one-child policy accelerated its own ageing, has begun to study Japan's介护 insurance closely even while it remains a poorer country. What foreign observers take away is less a blueprint than a set of warnings: start reforming pensions and care systems a decade before the demographic cliff arrives; invest early in preventive health, because every year added to healthy life expectancy saves a fortune in care costs; and treat older people as a workforce and a resource rather than as a burden. Japan has not solved the problem of a long-life society. It has, however, lived long enough to see which of its early choices worked and which did not, and to begin, slowly, to tell the rest of us. The telling is unlikely to be comfortable, because it requires wealthy countries to think of old age not as a reward to be withdrawn but as a stage of life to be designed for.

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 speed and unevenness of the transition ii. The long-term care insurance and community model iii. Keeping older workers in the economy iv. What other countries can learn from Japan v. The history of Japanese medicine in the 1950s vi. Why Tokyo's young people leave the city vii. The decline of Japan's railway system

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 does the writer call Japan's longevity "a success story"? A. Because it shows that public health and diet have worked. B. Because it reduces government spending on pensions. C. Because it means fewer schools are needed. D. Because it allows immigration from younger countries.

6. What was the main problem with elderly care before 2000? A. Families refused to look after their relatives. B. Many elderly lingered in acute-care hospitals at public cost. C. Insurance companies refused to sell policies. D. There were no doctors in rural areas.

7. What does the 2021 employment reform require employers to do? A. Mandatory retirement at sixty for all workers. B. Choose one of five measures to allow work up to age seventy. C. Pay older workers the same salary as younger ones. D. Send older workers abroad to find jobs.

8. According to the writer, what is the broader principle behind recent reforms? A. Everyone over seventy should receive identical benefits. B. Support should be based on function and income rather than age. C. Immigration should solve the labour shortage. D. Pensions should be abolished entirely.

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. Japan was the first country to reach twenty per cent elderly population.
10. The proportion of Japanese over sixty-five is projected to approach thirty-nine per cent by 2065.
11. The long-term care insurance system excludes people under sixty-five entirely.
12. Most of Japan's public debt is owed to foreign creditors.
13. Japan has already solved the problems of a long-life society.

Questions 14-15

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

Japan introduced long-term (14) __________ insurance in 2000 and has since built a community-based integrated care system, while encouraging older workers to stay employed until the age of (15) __________.

答案与解析

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