摘要：今天要跟大家分享的雅思閱讀素材題目是What Work Looks Like for Women in Their 50s?女人過50，工作是怎樣？50歲？50歲都還沒有退休呢吧？文章到底是要告訴我們什么，一起來看看吧！

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(互補的) 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 獵頭

sustainable 可持續的

non-linear 非線性的

plateau 平原

propel 推動(=push forward)

row 排;爭吵

complementary 互補的

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.(劍7T2P2)

參考譯文：政府有必要設立可持續性、有競爭力和多樣化的農業及糧食生產部門，這會為農村經濟的繁榮和可持續發展做出貢獻，并加快實現環境、經濟、健康以及動物福利方面的目標。

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.(劍4T4P3)

參考譯文：因此，在20世紀50年代和60年代，西方社會意識到，化石燃料能源的供應資源是有限的，并能被耗盡，自然界或環境維持經濟發展和人口增長的能力也是有限的。

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.(劍10T1P2)

參考譯文：這一宏偉目標到2090年才能完全實現，但是被提議的措施是建設一個持續的交通體系的關鍵第一步，這將在30年后完全實現，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.(劍10T1P2)

參考譯文：關注交通運輸的第一個辦法就是通過價格。這個辦法并不會與其他的交通方式相互補充。