a) The decades referred to in the text are the fifties, the sixties, the seventies and the nineties.
b) Advertising helped widen the standards of beauty and help models make a proper living, jumping from 100 euros a week for a successful model to an income of millions of euros.
c) Younger models were needed in the 1960s because of advertisers targeting a teenage audience for modeling.
d) Top models can acquire so-called perfection by getting cosmetic surgery done.
e)'She may be laughing all the way to the bank, but God help her if a single laughter line shows' means that she may be earning a lot of money easily, but as soon as any normal 'imperfections', such as laughter lines, show up, that might not work anymore. It means that you can never know your place in the modeling industry, one day you could be the most successful model and the next day you might not be considered the perfect beauty standard anymore.
f) The passive is used a lot in the first paragraph because the author is trying to emphasize the person or thing acted on, respectively the models.
