2010年3月高级口译SAQ第一篇（含问题）

Pensions lottery could make us all losers in long run

A former colleague relished telling me last week about two forthcoming new additions to the population. His wife is fit to pop with identical twin girls.

He and our sister publication, The Times, got me thinking: could the twins live to be 150? Times2 posed this very question alongside a photograph of a thumb-sucking newborn. Decrepitude is no longer inevitable, it said. Science will help us to stop the rot. There is, some scientists say, a real Dorian Gray among us — someone who, through a mixture of good genes, healthy lifestyle. and timely medical interventions, will give the impression of staying young throughout an extraordinarily long life.

I was still pondering the likelihood of living to 150 when I was presented with another big question: just how did Derren Brown do it? In a television stunt, he claimed to have predicted the six winning Lotto numbers, sparking an online guessing game about how did it. Indeed, “Derren Brown” and “lottery” were the two top searched-for keywords on the web that led users to timesonline.co.uk. Dozens of theories were offered — from camera trickery to simple sleight of hand.

Even actuaries were speaking about it. Clive Grimley, a partner at Barnett Waddingham, bought into the most popular theory. “According to someone on YouTube, he used split-screen technology to give the impression that the balls were in the live shot, when in fact they were a static image,” he mused. “The left-hand side of the screen, which showed the numbered balls in a row, was a frozen image. In reality, an assistant was putting the balls in place during the 30- second delay between them being drawn and Brown revealing his numbers. Like Edward Norton in The Illusionist, it’s all a trick.” Just as illusory, he says, are projections of retirement income. Pensioners today can expect to spend a third of their lives in retirement — a figure that could grow to half our life or more, as we all die later.

It may sound good in theory, but Grimley had some sobering views: the state pension age will have to rocket, a growing number of people will be forced to take “the glide path” — gradually winding down into retirement rather than stopping work altogether immediately — and the onus for funding our latter years will increasingly fall on our own shoulders. The NHS will crumble under the pressure, with 100-plus pensioners battering down the doors at doctors’ surgeries.

Early evidence stacks up his argument. It is already proposed that the state pension age for women will rise to 65 by 2020, making it equal to that of men. For both sexes, it will rise to 68 by 2046. That will be far from sufficient, though. “Increases to state retirement age are going to have to be fairly radical — I don’t think anyone wants to admit just how radical,” said Grimley.

A former colleague relished telling me last week about two forthcoming new additions to the population. His wife is fit to pop with identical twin girls.

He and our sister publication, The Times, got me thinking: could the twins live to be 150? Times2 posed this very question alongside a photograph of a thumb-sucking newborn. Decrepitude is no longer inevitable, it said. Science will help us to stop the rot. There is, some scientists say, a real Dorian Gray among us — someone who, through a mixture of good genes, healthy lifestyle. and timely medical interventions, will give the impression of staying young throughout an extraordinarily long life.