Do you know what a centenarian is?
It’s someone who is 100 years old.
What, then, could be a supercentenarian?

A supercentenarian is someone who has reached the age of 110. 1 in 1,000 centenarian will live to be supercentenarian.

When you google: “the oldest person ever“, Guinness World Records will give you the name: Jeanne Louise Calment and tell you a story of a woman who was born on 21 February 1875, around 14 years before the Eiffel Tower was constructed (she saw it being built), and some 20 years before the first movie screening. One year after her birth, Tolstoy published Anna Karenina and Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Jeanne Louise Calment from France lived a quiet life. But an unprecedentedly long one. Her marriage to a wealthy distant cousin, Fernand Nicolas Calment, in 1896 meant that Jeanne didn’t have to work for a living. That may have played a part in her extraordinary longevity: she was free to swim, play tennis, cycle (she was still cycling until the age of 100) and roller skate, all of which promoted excellent good health.

Of course, when you happen to live this long, it means that people around you don’t, so she lived through the deaths of her husband, daughter and even her grandson.

You can also read that Jeanne took up fencing when she was 85, mainly had a good diet, but also a sweet tooth – she apparently ate 1 kg of chocolate each week. She loved her cigarettes – started smoking at the age of 21 and quit only when she was 117.

Jeanne Calment made history when she died at the age of 122 in 1997, but a new investigation claims that the story is somewhat different.

A researcher, Nikolay Zak of the Moscow Centre For Continuous Mathematical Education claims that Calment, in fact, died at the age of 59 in 1934, and her daughter, Yvonne, assumed her identity in order to avoid inheritance taxes, and was thus the one who died in 1997, at the impressive-but-not-record-breaking age of 99.

The only way to prove the case would be to exhume the bodies and check their DNA.

What do you think?

Exercises

What do the words mean?