新SAT写作考试阅读精选材料推荐二（社会话题）

北京sat培训,sat备考资料,sat网课,sat培训机构,sat保分班,sat真题

本文为大家推荐的是来源于《纽约时报》的一篇文章——Old and on the Street: The Graying of America’s

Homeless作者是Adam Nagourney.

文章内容：

LOS ANGELES — They lean unsteadily on canes and walkers, or roll along the

sidewalks of Skid Row here in beat-up wheelchairs, past soiled sleeping bags,

swaying tents and piles of garbage. They wander the streets in tattered winter

coats, even in the warmth of spring. They worry about the illnesses of age and

how they will approach death without the help of children who long ago drifted

from their lives.

“It’s hard when you get older,” said Ken Sylvas, 65, who has struggled with

alcoholism and has not worked since he was fired in 2001 from a meatpacking job.

“I’m in this wheelchair. I had a seizure and was in a convalescent home for two

months. I just ride the bus back and forth all night.”

The homeless in America are getting old.

There were 306,000 people over 50 living on the streets in 2014, the most

recent data available, a 20 percent jump since 2007, according to the Department

of Housing and Urban Development. They now make up 31 percent of the nation’s

homeless population.

The demographic shift is mirrored by a noticeable but not as sharp increase

among homeless people ages 18 to 30, many who entered the job market during the

Great Recession. They make up 24 percent of the homeless population. Like the

baby boomers, these young people came of age during an economic downturn,

confronting a tight housing and job market. Many of them are former foster

children or runaways, or were victims of abuse at home.

But it is the emergence of an older homeless population that is creating

daunting challenges for social service agencies and governments already

struggling with this crisis of poverty. “Baby boomers have health and

vulnerability issues that are hard to tend to while living in the streets,” said

Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest who has spent 35 years working with the

homeless in Los Angeles.

Many older homeless people have been on the streets for almost a

generation, analysts say, a legacy of the recessions of the late 1970s and early

1980s, federal housing cutbacks and an epidemic of crack cocaine. They bring

with them a complicated history that may include a journey from prison to mental

health clinic to rehabilitation center and back to the sidewalks.

Some are more recent arrivals and have been forced — at a time of life when

some people their age are debating whether to retire to Arizona or to Florida —

to learn the ways of homelessness after losing jobs in the latest economic

downturn. And there are some on a fixed income who cannot afford the rent in

places like Los Angeles, which has a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent.

Horace Allong, 60, said he could not afford a one-room apartment and lives

in a tent on Crocker Street. Allong, who divorced his wife and left New Orleans

for Los Angeles two years ago, said he lost his wallet and all of his

identification two weeks after he arrived and has not been able to find a

job.

“It’s the first time I’ve been on the streets, so I’m learning,” he said.

“There’s nothing like Skid Row. Skid Row is another world.”

The problems with homelessness are hardly uniform across the country. The

national homeless population declined by 2 percent from 2014 to 2015, according

to the Department of Housing and Urban Renewal. Some communities — including

Phoenix and Las Vegas — have declared outright victory in eliminating

homelessness among veterans, a top goal of the White House.

But homelessness is rising in big cities where gentrification is on the

march and housing costs are rising, like Los Angeles, New York, Honolulu and San

Francisco. Los Angeles reported a 5.7 percent increase in its homeless

population last year, the second year in a row it had recorded a jump. More than

20 percent of the nation’s homeless lived in California last year, according to

the housing agency.

Across Southern California, the homeless live in tent encampments clustered

on corners from Venice to the San Fernando Valley, and in communities sprouting

under highway overpasses or in the dry bed of the Los Angeles River. Their

sleeping bags and piles of belongings line sidewalks on Santa Monica

Boulevard.

Along with these visible signs of homelessness come complaints about

aggressive panhandling, public urination and disorderly conduct, as well as a

rise in drug dealing and petty crimes.

“There is a sense out there that some communities are seeing a new visible

homeless problem that they have not seen in many years,” said Dennis P. Culhane,

a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beleaguered officials in Los Angeles, Seattle and Hawaii have declared

states of emergency, rolling out measures to combat homelessness and pledging to

increase spending on low-cost housing. Honolulu has imposed a prohibition on

sitting or lying on sidewalks in the neighborhood of Waikiki. San Francisco has

cleared out some encampments, only for them to sprout up in other parts of the

city. Seattle has tried to create designated tent camps that are overseen by

social service agencies.

The aging of the homeless population is on display in cities large and

small, but perhaps in no place more than here on Skid Row, a grid of blocks just

southeast of the vibrant economic center of downtown Los Angeles, where many of

the nation’s poor have long flocked, drawn by a year-round temperate climate and

a cluster of missions and clinics.

Outside the Hippie Kitchen, which feeds the homeless of Skid Row three

mornings a week, the line stretched half a block up Sixth Street on a recent

day, a graying gathering of men and women waiting for a breakfast of beans and

salad.

Kin Crawford, 59, said he had fallen out of the job market long ago as he

battled alcohol and drug addiction. “Right now, I’m sleeping in someone’s

garage,” he said. “My biggest challenge out here? Access to a bathroom. It’s

really crazy. That and finding a place to keep your stuff.”

This is a fluid population, defying precise count or categorization. Some

might enjoy a stretch of stability, holding down a job for a while or finding a

spare bed with a friend. But more than anything, these are men and women who, as

they enter old age, have settled into patterns they seem unwilling, or unable,

to break.

“We are seeing people who have been on the street year after year after

year,” said Jerry Jones, the director of public policy at the Inner City Law

Center in Los Angeles.

Sylvas said the lines at the Hippie Kitchen were growing longer, and there

were more tents on the sidewalks. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “You can see

it. A lot more old ones.”

The challenges faced by older people have forced advocates for the homeless

and government agencies to reconsider what kinds of services they need: It is

not just a meal, a roof and rehabilitation anymore.

“The programs for baby boomers are designed to address longstanding

programs — mental health, substance abuse,” said Benjamin Henwood, an assistant

professor at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. “But

they are not designed to address the problems of aging, and that is a big

problem for homeless treatment in the years ahead.”

以上就是文章全文了，讨论的是流浪者的社会话题，小伙伴们可以先练习阅读文章，归纳文章的论点和中心思想以及文章中作者使用的分析论技巧，最后就是尝试着写作。

传送门

6月4日亚太新SAT考试真题回忆解析：http://sat.yibohua.con/fuxi46227.html

新SAT考试OG阅读核心词汇大放送汇总：http://sat.yibohua.con/yuedu45995.html