Example Test Academic Lit 2019
Example Test Academic Lit 2019
Example Test Academic Lit 2019
Instructions
Do not open this test booklet until you are told to do so.
You must answer each question by putting a circle around the correct letter A,
B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET.
Please be aware that the February 14th test will be a computer based test.
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Part 1
You are going to read an article about the measles vaccination. For questions 1–6,
choose the answer (A, B, C, or D) which fits best according to the text.
The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that measles antibodies develop in
approximately 95% of children vaccinated at 12 months and 98% vaccinated at 15
months or older. It is estimated that about 2–5% of children, who receive the vaccine
at 12 months of age or younger or who only get one dose of Measles Mumps and
Rubella vaccine (MMR), fail to be protected. A second dose of MMR is thought to
stimulate a protective immune response in about 99% of vaccine recipients.
Following the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, public-health officials
recommended only one dose of measles vaccine for all children. However, by 1989,
following multiple outbreaks, including several occurring in fully vaccinated
populations, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
updated its advice, and recommended that a second dose of measles vaccine,
preferably the MMR vaccine, be administered to all children prior to school entry.
Currently the CDC states that vaccine-induced immunity ‘appears to be long term
and probably lifelong in most persons’. However, studies have shown that vaccine
failure due to diminishing immunity can occur. In 2015, infectious disease experts
reported that approximately one in ten measles-vaccinated individuals may be at risk
of measles due to this effect. In 2011, news reports from India publicly stated that
only one child in five vaccinated for measles was actually protected from contracting
the disease, even after being fully vaccinated. Measles vaccine-acquired immunity is
reported to wane in at least 5% of cases, within 10 to 15 years after vaccination, so
outbreaks of measles can still occur in highly vaccinated populations.
The use of a third MMR vaccine dose to boost low measles vaccine-induced
antibodies also doesn’t appear to be effective. A recent study found that
administering an additional dose of MMR vaccine in an attempt to boost antibodies in
persons found to have low vaccine-induced measles antibodies was ineffective,
leaving this particular population at risk for developing measles infection. In 2017, an
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outbreak of measles occurred amongst young soldiers in the Middle East. The
primary patient involved in the outbreak had documentation of having received three
doses of measles vaccine and an additional eight cases of measles were found to
have occurred in persons who reported having, or provided documentation of having,
at least two doses of a measles-containing vaccine.
There is some evidence that if infants born to mothers who have experienced natural
measles infection, are vaccinated at less than one year of age, they may not develop
long-lasting vaccine-acquired antibodies because natural maternal antibodies
interfere with vaccine-induced antibodies. Research on maternal antibodies has also
found that infants born to mothers who were vaccinated against measles had lower
levels of maternal antibodies and lost them sooner in comparison to infants born to
mothers who had developed natural immunity from prior infection. As a result, babies
born to such mothers may be at greater risk of developing measles due to the poor
quality and short duration of maternal antibodies.
Although measles cases have declined globally since the 1980s as vaccination
coverage has increased, there has been a resurgence of measles in Europe since
2017 with adults over 20 years comprising more than a third of all cases. This means
that the median age of people contracting measles is increasing in countries such as
Germany. This may be attributed to waning immunity, the impact of which is likely to
become more apparent in future as the vaccinated population grows older and time
passes since their vaccination. Indeed, one thought-provoking research finding
suggests that, rather ironically, exposure to natural measles may be necessary for
the maintenance of protective antibodies in vaccinated persons.
Indeed, a range of possible factors may go some way to explaining recent outbreaks
of the disease in places where full vaccination is long established, and these warrant
further investigation. A case in point relates to the number of vaccinated people who
become infected with measles without exhibiting the typical range and severity of
symptoms. Such individuals, who may well be fully vaccinated, are capable of
transmitting the disease to others, but vaccinated individuals aren’t routinely
surveyed to determine whether they’re experiencing asymptomatic or atypical
measles. This would seem to be a good use of any available resources.
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1 Advice regarding the measles vaccine was amended in 1989 in order to
3 The writer uses the example of soldiers in the Middle East to underline her
point that administering further doses of vaccine may
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5 The writer is intrigued by the idea that a recent rise in cases of measles in
Europe might be attributed to
Part 2
You are going to read an article about the design of healthcare environments. For
questions 7–12, choose the answer (A, B, C, or D) which fits best according to the
text.
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environments may have a greater impact for these individuals, who often arrive in an
emotionally charged state.
The research project detailed here is the final stage of a study investigating the
needs of service users of mental-health services relative to the built environments
delivering these services. The building in question is a community-based, mental-
health facility providing therapy and counselling services for outpatients. The aim is
to address the following investigative areas: the applicability of VR as a participatory
design and research tool by testing its potential in an empirical study; understanding
the supportive and unsupportive aspects of the built environment that might influence
mental-health service user outcomes and experiences; and the efficacy of EBD in
capturing mental-health service-user voices regarding the design of built therapeutic
environments.
The study aims to recruit a minimum of fifteen adult volunteers who have been users
of mental-health services in the past. They will participate in a VR walk-through,
followed by a semi-structured interview. Each interviewee will be provided with the
list of intended interview questions, and each VR walk-through and interview will last
up to an hour. Being a relatively new area of research, these participant numbers are
based on sample sizes used in comparable in-depth qualitative research. It is
recognised, however, that this will preclude the identification of any trends regarding
whether characteristics of age, gender or cultural background influenced the
perception of these architectural spaces. The VR walk-through is an architectural
model of a building produced through co-design with service users of mental-health
services. This VR walk-through isn’t intended to be therapeutic in itself or to form
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part of any mental-health intervention or treatment. Rather, it represents a prototype
building design. The VR walk-through model involves a building uninhabited in VR by
any other individual (real or virtual).
Anticipated benefits are that the project will result in a toolkit set of guidance
principles on access, design, community engagement, well-being measures and VR
interventions, which could be used by mental-health services and stakeholders. But
it doesn’t take steps to calibrate or compare participant responses to the virtual
environments with any corresponding physical environments. A validation process is
also required in order that researchers can more explicitly comprehend the extent to
which real and virtual spatial perceptions differ, and thus more accurately determine
the robustness of any such framework before it informs real-world design practice.
The next phase for the study involves further testing of the VR environment with
actual patient cohorts as they attend the mental-health service. This will enable an
exploration of how service users who are actually facing the emotions associated
with a care appointment, such as frustration, boredom and anxiety in the waiting
room, respond to the virtual environments. Eventually, this data could be further
augmented with the incorporation of physiological measures, such as heart rate,
blood pressure and cortisol measurements, alongside eye-tracking to pinpoint which
elements within the environment are observed and hold attention. For a more holistic
understanding of how healthcare settings affect service-user outcomes and
experiences, the inclusion of VR testing within a mixed-methods research
programme is advocated; inclusion of interviews, focus groups, observations, and
participatory co-design workshops would provide a more comprehensive
understanding of participant responses.
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8 What does the writer suggest about the use of VR to inform the design of
healthcare facilities?
9 The current research project sets out to establish the extent to which EBD can
10 What does the writer say about the sample size used?
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12 The next stage of the research project will seek to use VR
Part 3
You are going to read an article about the evolution of technology. For questions
13–18, choose the answer (A, B, C, or D) which fits best according to the text.
In fact, over the whole of human history, we’ve probably lost more innovations than
we now possess, says anthropologist Luke Premo. It’s a sobering thought. Just
when we were pinning our hopes on producing high-tech fixes for today’s problems –
climate change, emerging infectious diseases and so on – comes the news that
we’re not advancing inexorably towards technological Nirvana after all. Nevertheless,
a better understanding of how technologies evolve could hold some valuable lessons
for the future. In building a more fine-grained picture of human technological history,
we may identify clues as to what will work and what won’t.
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individual started again from scratch because of a lack of what’s termed ‘cumulative
culture’. This rests on two key skills: social learning – the transmission of knowledge
to new members of a group, and over-imitation – the high-fidelity copying of a
behaviour, including irrelevant or incidental elements, which allows the behaviour
and its context to be passed along together. Some researchers have argued that
cumulative culture only made its appearance around a hundred-thousand years ago.
But anthropologist and stone-tool expert Dietrich Stout has challenged that view.
Premo suggests another reason why Stone Age creativity may have been
underestimated. Throughout those apparently uneventful two-million years, our
ancestors were hunter-gatherers who lived in extended, itinerant family groups of
between twenty and forty adults, plus children. ‘These could have been exposed to
fairly high chances of the whole group going extinct,’ he says, whether because their
best hunter was incapacitated due to illness or injury, or because environmental
conditions changed rapidly. When a local population died out, all its innovations went
with it – and that could mean the loss of generations' worth of know-how.
But if Stone Age toolmakers were innovating, where is the evidence? The
archaeological record is notoriously patchy and gets sparser the further back you go.
But this alone can’t account for the perception that there was a lack of progress.
Charles Perreault gathered information about five-hundred archaeological artefacts -
tools, pots, etc. dating from the past ten-thousand years – and analysed how they
changed over time. He found that the rate of change appeared rapid over short time
periods and slower over longer ones. A key reason for this is that there are many
advances and retreats that tend to cancel each other out in the longer view.
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So, what of the future? Technological progress, as measured by indicators such as
the rate of scientific publication and patents filed, has been accelerating
exponentially over the past few centuries, but now shows signs of slowing. It seems
we’ve accumulated so much knowledge, that we spend a disproportionate amount of
time learning from previous generations at the expense of innovation. For example,
physics undergraduates are largely tested on their grasp of pre-1900 discoveries,
only post-graduate work goes beyond that. This lag is having an impact.
14 In the second paragraph, the writer is suggesting that Premo’s analysis of the
history of innovation
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15 What assumption regarding ‘cumulative culture’ does Stout challenge?
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18 In the final paragraph, the writer is suggesting that future technological
progress
Part 4
You are going to read an article about imagination. For questions 19–24, choose
the answer (A, B, C, or D) which fits best according to the text.
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When writer Catherine Brahic discovered that nobody knows how much time
people typically spend immersed in figments of imagination, she set out to keep track
of her own imaginings over the course of a month. She gave up after a few hours,
overwhelmed by the scale of the task, concluding that imagination was an almost
continuous feature of inner life that encompasses everything from planning meals, to
prioritising today’s workload, to structuring the next sentence. Similarly, every day we
play out various scenarios in our minds to enable us to select the best one. This kind
of mental flight of fancy is an important part of how we make decisions, allowing us
to explore our emotional reactions to various outcomes without actually having to
experience them. Imagination also plays a role in designing and innovation. Brahic
points out that every human-made object in your line of vision was imagined before it
became real - that daydreaming and fantasy are inextricably linked to hypothetical
thinking.
To rule out any confusion with memory, Alison Gopnik - psychologist and
philosopher – says that imagination is our ability to consider possibilities that we
know aren’t true in the here and now – a definition that includes mythical beasts and
future events but excludes memories and visualisations of things that really
happened. Even this narrow definition encompasses a large proportion of human
thought. Gopnik is particularly interested in counterfactual thinking, a kind of
imagination that treads a fine line between the real and the unreal. Like when you’re
interviewed for a new job and afterwards you mull over everything that happened
and how it might have played out differently if you’d given different answers. In other
words, you think about a reality that didn’t happen – but only just. This is how we
gain insights from our mistakes and adjust our behaviour accordingly, which is seen
as one of the prime functions of imagination. Gopnik also accepts that it’s almost
impossible to say how much time the average adult spends immersed in mental
time-travel, daydreaming, planning, counterfactual thinking, creativity and fantasy.
‘But one thing pretty much everyone agrees on,’ she says, ‘is that however much we
as adults imagine, we don’t do it nearly as much as children.’
Whether children’s imaginary worlds predict something about their future is an open
question. One study led by Michele Root-Bernstein found that adults who received
awards for creativity were more likely to have had paracosms as children. But there
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simply haven’t been any long-term studies following individuals over decades to
show whether children who engage in more pretend play make more creative adults.
Some studies also suggest that children with imaginary friends have stronger theory
of mind – meaning they are better able to understand and relate to the mental states
of other people. Steven Mithen, an archaeologist and anthropologist suggests that
the evolution of theory of mind in our early ancestors was the first step in acquiring
our unique skills of imagination.
C They question how reliable research into the imagination can be.
21 Who agrees with Brahic’s view that it’s impossible to quantify how long an
individual spends ‘immersed in figments of imagination’?
A Marjorie Taylor
B Alison Gopnik
C Michele Root-Bernstein
D Steven Mithen
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22 In the third paragraph, it is suggested that the idea of ‘counterfactual thinking’
underlines the role of the imagination in
24 According to the article, who is keenest to set limits on the definition of what
‘the imagination’ means?
A Marjorie Taylor
B Catherine Brahic
C Alison Gopnik
D Michele Root-Bernstein
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Part 5
You are going to read an article about genomics. For questions 25–30, choose the
answer (A, B, C, or D) which fits best according to the text.
In the two decades since the Human Genome Project was declared complete, untold
billions have been poured into projects promising to map and interpret our genetic
code. Hopes and fears for the expected revolution have affected all walks of life from
science fiction to the health service. Jenny Reardon’s book The Postgenomic
Condition draws on decades of fieldwork to tell stories that lay bare the intricate
tangle of technologies, individuals, institutions, expectations, experiments,
businesses, communities, acts of resistance and superhuman efforts of grinding hard
work that make up our genomic age. It is an example of the best kind of sociological
writing, where specific, detailed, well-told stories are built into a powerful set of
arguments with implications not only for the field in question, but for wider society
too. This is a book not just about what went wrong in genomics, and how hopes for a
better world go awry, it is also about what happens when our society encounters new
technologies that refuse to stand still long enough to be understood.
One phenomenon that she investigates is the craze for off-the-shelf DNA-testing kits.
These tests draw on the persistent, enticing idea of genetics as a ‘book of life’ – a
magical tome that, decrypted, would spill secrets of our past and future: our
pedigree, our susceptibilities to illness, our innate capabilities and the traits and
possibilities we might pass on to our children. But recent years have seen a growing
sense that this metaphor has failed. In 2010, Craig Venter, the photo-finish loser of
the race to sequence the human genome in 2000, said: ‘We’ve learned nothing from
the genome. And since then, though sequencing technologies have become faster
and cheaper, and our biobanks and databases continue to grow, few clear single-
gene causes for single, clear health problems have been identified. We’re mired in
disappointment’ In Reardon’s words, ‘struggling to reap the promised harvest of
meaningful knowledge that might foster life and human understanding’.
We have a few genetic tests for rare diseases such as Huntington’s – but tests don’t
mean treatments. They have value, but they aren’t the world-changing revolutions
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we thought we were trading our blood and tissues for. Billions and billions of dollars
have been spent in a world short of doctors and nurses, where antimicrobial
resistance is on the rise, where simple things that we know work to radically improve
population health – education, empowerment, better food and housing – are
inaccessible to so many. Was chasing the slim hope of staggeringly expensive,
targeted treatments for the elite really the best use of our resources? Reardon, to her
credit, faces these questions head on.
There is no simple enemy here, and no single mistake. In her account of the Human
Genome Project, Reardon refuses to succumb to the familiar myth in which valiant
academics worked through the night to vanquish greedy corporate interests and
save the genome for the human race. She paints instead a nuanced picture of the
actions and motivations of the institutions and individuals involved. This refusal to
settle for simple answers is maintained throughout the book. The theoretical
argument is strung through a chain of stories – about national biobanks and start-
ups, research projects and acts of community resistance, experiments, ad
campaigns and corporate takeovers – which centres on Hannah Arendt’s assertion
that progress relies on society’s ability to identify things of value, and to gather
around those things to decide what to do with them. In genomics, and by implication,
in the wider world of frantic technological innovation, Reardon argues that every part
of this construction comes under threat.
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25 From the first paragraph, we learn that Reardon’s book provides
26 The writer quotes from Craig Ventnor to underline his point that
A the early promise of the human genome project hasn’t been realised.
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28 The writer suggests that Reardon’s account of the human genome project
30 The writer quotes from both Lyotard and Nunberg to support the view that
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