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  3. Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents

Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents

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问题     Fifty is the gateway to the most liberating passage in a woman’s life. Children are making test flights out of the nest. Parents are expected to be roaming in their recreational vehicles or sending postcards of themselves riding camels. Free at last! Women can graduate from the precarious balancing act between parenting and pursuit of a career. That has been the message of my books since I wrote New Passages 15 years ago. What I didn’t see coming was the boomerang.
    With parents living routinely into their 90s, a second round of caregiving has become a predictable crisis for women in midlife. Nearly 50 million Americans are taking care of an adult who used to be independent. Yes, men represent about one third of family caregivers, but their participation is often at a distance and administrative. Women do most of the hands-on care.
    It starts with the call. It’s a call about a fall. Your mom has had a stroke. Or it’s a call about your dad—he’s run a red light and hit someone, again, but how are you ever going to persuade him to stop driving? Or your hushand’s doctor calls with news that your partner is reluctant to tell you: it’s cancer.
    When that call came to me, I froze. The shock plunges you into a whirlpool of fear, denial, and feverish action. You search out doctors. They don’t agree on the diagnosis. You scavenge the Internet. The side effects make you worry. You call your brother or sister, hoping for help. Old rivalries flare up.
    We’d like to think that siblings would be natural allies when parents falter. But the facts are quite different. Brothers bury their heads in the sand. The farther away a sister lives, the more certain she will call the primary caregiver and tell her she doesn’t know what she’s doing. A 1996 study by Cornell and Louisiana State universities concluded that siblings are not just inherent rivals, but the greatest source of stress between human beings.
    There are many rewards in giving back to a loved one. And the short-term stress of mobilizing against the initial crisis jump-starts the body’s positive responses. But this role is not a short race. It usually turns into a marathon, averaging almost five years. But most solitary caregivers will wait until the third or fourth year before sending out the desperate cry "I can’t do this anymore!"
The author stresses that the process of giving back to a loved one is very______.
选项 A、hopeless
B、rewarding
C、demanding
D、fruitless
答案C
解析 根据文中最后一段的内容可知，回报亲人的方法有很多。短期聚积起来的反抗最初危机的压力迅速调动起身体的积极反应，但是这份职责不是短跑比赛，它通常会转变成一场平均几近五年之久的马拉松。在发出绝望的叫喊声“我无法再做下去了”之前，大多数孤单的护理者还得等待三四年。据此可知，作者强调回报亲人的过程非常费力。C项正确。
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