The Fountain of Youth
- Details
- Parent Category: Advanced English Students
- Category: Advanced Mini Lessons
- Written by Chris Cotter
Baby boomers desire youth, even as they age and retire. They seek to live a healthy, enjoyable, and active retirement. In fact, the need to outdo past generations in terms of health has become a common sentiment, with people striving to appear and act decades younger.
Botox treatments, hormone injections, and cosmetic surgery have all become flourishing industries. The effects are immediate, although no one yet knows the cost to long-term health. People may be jeopardizing their chances for longer and healthier lives in favor of focusing on short-term gains, as the side effects of treatments remain completely unknown when used over decades. What's more, in the quest to stay young, many have become victims of scams, as treatments are hawked with all sorts of unproven promises. And now there is having a trickledown effect on teens and twenty-somethings who similarly view as acceptable cosmetic surgery and other beauty treatments.
Preview the lesson material:
Warm Up: Discuss the questions with your partner for five minutes.
- Do you think people are healthier these days? Why/not?
Vocabulary: Check the new vocabulary in a dictionary. Then match the words.
- outdo
- sentiment
- quest
- hawk
- sell
- something searched for
- beat or win
- opinion
Discuss: Discuss these questions with a partner. Remember to support your answers.
- What do you think about hormone injections and cosmetic surgery to stay young?
- Would you want to receive hormone injections and cosmetic surgery to stay young?
- Would you want to live for a few hundred years if you could be healthy and active?