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  3. Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Satur

Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Satur

admin2019-06-06  33
问题    Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Saturday, she goes down to the local grocery store and hands out samples, earning $50 a day, because she needs the money.
   More and more older people are finding themselves in a similar situation as Baby Boomers reach retirement age without enough savings and as housing costs and medical expenses rise. Many people reaching retirement age don’t have the pensions that lots of workers in previous generations did, and often have not put enough money into their 401(k)s to live off of. Other workers did not have access to a retirement plan through their employer.
   That means that as people reach their mid-60s, they either have to dramatically curtail their spending or keep working to survive. "This will be the first time that we have a lot of people who find themselves downwardly mobile as they grow older," Diane Oakley, the executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security, told me. "They’re going to go from being near poor to poor."
   The problem is growing as more Baby Boomers reach retirement age—between 8,000 to 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, according to Kevin Prindiville, the executive director of Justice in Aging, a nonprofit that addresses senior poverty. Older Americans were the only demographic for whom poverty rates increased in a statistically significant way between 2015 and 2016, according to Census Bureau data. While poverty fell among people 18 and under and people 18 to 64 between 2015 and 2016, it rose to 14.5 percent for people over 65, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is considered a more accurate measure of poverty because it takes into account health-care costs and other big expenses. "In the early decades of our work, we were serving communities that had been poor when they were younger," Prindiville told me. "Increasingly, we’re seeing folks who are becoming poor for the first time in old age."
   This presents a worrying preview of what could befall millions of workers who will retire in the coming decades. If today’s seniors are struggling with retirement savings, what will become of the people of working age today, many of whom hold unsteady jobs and have patchwork incomes that leave little room for retirement savings? The current wave of senior poverty could just be the beginning. And this could have larger implications for the economy. If today’s middle-class households curtail their spending when they retire, the whole economy could suffer.  
The word "curtail" (Para. 3) most probably means______.
选项 A、retain
B、reduce
C、count
D、escape
答案B
解析 词汇理解题。根据定位词定位到文章第三段首句。单词所在句句意为，这意味着，当人们达到60岁左右时，他们要么不得不大幅度______开支，要么继续工作才能生存。可知，人们必须减少开支，故B项为正确选项。
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