Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 10

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

[…]A brain region called the hippocampus is critical for memory formation and also seems to be involved in navigation. Neurons in the hippocampus called “place” cells selectively respond to being in specific locations, forming a cognitive map of the environment. Such spatial information is clearly important for “episodic” (autobiographical rather than factual) memory. But so, too, are other aspects of experience, such as changing sensory input. There is evidence that neurons in the hippocampus encode sensory changes by altering the frequency at which they fire, a phenomenon termed “rate remapping.” According to research by neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, such changes may also encode information about where an animal has been and where it is going, enabling rate remapping to represent trajectories of travel.

In the new study, published last week in Nature Neuroscience, the team—led by Chen Sun, a graduate student in Tonegawa’s lab—devised a task that attempted to disentangle the discrete, segmented nature of events from the continuously changing spatial and sensory details of moment-to-moment experience. The researchers trained mice to run around a square track. After doing four laps, the animals were rewarded with a sweet treat. They visited the reward box after every lap, segmenting each trial into four “events. Each lap traversed the same route, so sensory and location information was constant from one event to the next, allowing the researchers to attribute brain activity differences to what did change: the laps, or events.

The researchers recorded activity in hundreds of hippocampal cells while the mice performed this task and found that around 30 percent of cells showed a lap-specific pattern. These neurons, which the researchers termed “event-specific rate remapping,” or ESR, cells, seemed to signal which lap a mouse was on.

In another experiment, the team trained mice on a square track on the first day, then substituted a circular track on the next one. Shifting to a new environment resulted in the ESR cells’ spatial responses being completely remapped onto the circular track. Strikingly, though, the lap that those neurons preferentially responded to remained the same. These findings suggest that ESR activity represents segmented units of experience.

The circular track experiment showed that brain responses that specify your precise location can be altered without affecting event-specific activity. In a final experiment, the team asked whether the reverse is also true. A region called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) works closely with the hippocampus in spatial cognition and navigation. There is also evidence that it is involved in segmenting experience into sequential events. The researchers used optogenetics to switch off signals from the MEC to the hippocampus while mice performed the running task. Doing so had no effect on location-specific responses but completely disrupted lap-specific ones, suggesting place and event encoding can be separately manipulated—even though the same cells process both aspects of experience.

[…] “There’s no demonstration that these event-related patterns exist the first time an animal experiences a set of events—only that they appear after many repeats of a now familiar sequence,” Frank says. “This is not really the same as our episodic memories, where each new experience gets encoded separately and stored as an event the first (and often only) time it happens.” He thinks the cells represent “well-learned and relevant elements of an experience with repeating elements.”

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

[…]A brain region called the hippocampus is critical for memory formation and also seems to be involved in navigation. Neurons in the hippocampus called “place” cells selectively respond to being in specific locations, forming a cognitive map of the environment. Such spatial information is clearly important for “episodic” (autobiographical rather than factual) memory. But so, too, are other aspects of experience, such as changing sensory input. There is evidence that neurons in the hippocampus encode sensory changes by altering the frequency at which they fire, a phenomenon termed “rate remapping.” According to research by neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, such changes may also encode information about where an animal has been and where it is going, enabling rate remapping to represent trajectories of travel.

In the new study, published last week in Nature Neuroscience, the team—led by Chen Sun, a graduate student in Tonegawa’s lab—devised a task that attempted to disentangle the discrete, segmented nature of events from the continuously changing spatial and sensory details of moment-to-moment experience. The researchers trained mice to run around a square track. After doing four laps, the animals were rewarded with a sweet treat. They visited the reward box after every lap, segmenting each trial into four “events. Each lap traversed the same route, so sensory and location information was constant from one event to the next, allowing the researchers to attribute brain activity differences to what did change: the laps, or events.

The researchers recorded activity in hundreds of hippocampal cells while the mice performed this task and found that around 30 percent of cells showed a lap-specific pattern. These neurons, which the researchers termed “event-specific rate remapping,” or ESR, cells, seemed to signal which lap a mouse was on.

In another experiment, the team trained mice on a square track on the first day, then substituted a circular track on the next one. Shifting to a new environment resulted in the ESR cells’ spatial responses being completely remapped onto the circular track. Strikingly, though, the lap that those neurons preferentially responded to remained the same. These findings suggest that ESR activity represents segmented units of experience.

The circular track experiment showed that brain responses that specify your precise location can be altered without affecting event-specific activity. In a final experiment, the team asked whether the reverse is also true. A region called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) works closely with the hippocampus in spatial cognition and navigation. There is also evidence that it is involved in segmenting experience into sequential events. The researchers used optogenetics to switch off signals from the MEC to the hippocampus while mice performed the running task. Doing so had no effect on location-specific responses but completely disrupted lap-specific ones, suggesting place and event encoding can be separately manipulated—even though the same cells process both aspects of experience.

[…] “There’s no demonstration that these event-related patterns exist the first time an animal experiences a set of events—only that they appear after many repeats of a now familiar sequence,” Frank says. “This is not really the same as our episodic memories, where each new experience gets encoded separately and stored as an event the first (and often only) time it happens.” He thinks the cells represent “well-learned and relevant elements of an experience with repeating elements.”

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

[…]A brain region called the hippocampus is critical for memory formation and also seems to be involved in navigation. Neurons in the hippocampus called “place” cells selectively respond to being in specific locations, forming a cognitive map of the environment. Such spatial information is clearly important for “episodic” (autobiographical rather than factual) memory. But so, too, are other aspects of experience, such as changing sensory input. There is evidence that neurons in the hippocampus encode sensory changes by altering the frequency at which they fire, a phenomenon termed “rate remapping.” According to research by neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, such changes may also encode information about where an animal has been and where it is going, enabling rate remapping to represent trajectories of travel.

In the new study, published last week in Nature Neuroscience, the team—led by Chen Sun, a graduate student in Tonegawa’s lab—devised a task that attempted to disentangle the discrete, segmented nature of events from the continuously changing spatial and sensory details of moment-to-moment experience. The researchers trained mice to run around a square track. After doing four laps, the animals were rewarded with a sweet treat. They visited the reward box after every lap, segmenting each trial into four “events. Each lap traversed the same route, so sensory and location information was constant from one event to the next, allowing the researchers to attribute brain activity differences to what did change: the laps, or events.

The researchers recorded activity in hundreds of hippocampal cells while the mice performed this task and found that around 30 percent of cells showed a lap-specific pattern. These neurons, which the researchers termed “event-specific rate remapping,” or ESR, cells, seemed to signal which lap a mouse was on.

In another experiment, the team trained mice on a square track on the first day, then substituted a circular track on the next one. Shifting to a new environment resulted in the ESR cells’ spatial responses being completely remapped onto the circular track. Strikingly, though, the lap that those neurons preferentially responded to remained the same. These findings suggest that ESR activity represents segmented units of experience.

The circular track experiment showed that brain responses that specify your precise location can be altered without affecting event-specific activity. In a final experiment, the team asked whether the reverse is also true. A region called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) works closely with the hippocampus in spatial cognition and navigation. There is also evidence that it is involved in segmenting experience into sequential events. The researchers used optogenetics to switch off signals from the MEC to the hippocampus while mice performed the running task. Doing so had no effect on location-specific responses but completely disrupted lap-specific ones, suggesting place and event encoding can be separately manipulated—even though the same cells process both aspects of experience.

[…] “There’s no demonstration that these event-related patterns exist the first time an animal experiences a set of events—only that they appear after many repeats of a now familiar sequence,” Frank says. “This is not really the same as our episodic memories, where each new experience gets encoded separately and stored as an event the first (and often only) time it happens.” He thinks the cells represent “well-learned and relevant elements of an experience with repeating elements.”

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

[…]A brain region called the hippocampus is critical for memory formation and also seems to be involved in navigation. Neurons in the hippocampus called “place” cells selectively respond to being in specific locations, forming a cognitive map of the environment. Such spatial information is clearly important for “episodic” (autobiographical rather than factual) memory. But so, too, are other aspects of experience, such as changing sensory input. There is evidence that neurons in the hippocampus encode sensory changes by altering the frequency at which they fire, a phenomenon termed “rate remapping.” According to research by neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, such changes may also encode information about where an animal has been and where it is going, enabling rate remapping to represent trajectories of travel.

In the new study, published last week in Nature Neuroscience, the team—led by Chen Sun, a graduate student in Tonegawa’s lab—devised a task that attempted to disentangle the discrete, segmented nature of events from the continuously changing spatial and sensory details of moment-to-moment experience. The researchers trained mice to run around a square track. After doing four laps, the animals were rewarded with a sweet treat. They visited the reward box after every lap, segmenting each trial into four “events. Each lap traversed the same route, so sensory and location information was constant from one event to the next, allowing the researchers to attribute brain activity differences to what did change: the laps, or events.

The researchers recorded activity in hundreds of hippocampal cells while the mice performed this task and found that around 30 percent of cells showed a lap-specific pattern. These neurons, which the researchers termed “event-specific rate remapping,” or ESR, cells, seemed to signal which lap a mouse was on.

In another experiment, the team trained mice on a square track on the first day, then substituted a circular track on the next one. Shifting to a new environment resulted in the ESR cells’ spatial responses being completely remapped onto the circular track. Strikingly, though, the lap that those neurons preferentially responded to remained the same. These findings suggest that ESR activity represents segmented units of experience.

The circular track experiment showed that brain responses that specify your precise location can be altered without affecting event-specific activity. In a final experiment, the team asked whether the reverse is also true. A region called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) works closely with the hippocampus in spatial cognition and navigation. There is also evidence that it is involved in segmenting experience into sequential events. The researchers used optogenetics to switch off signals from the MEC to the hippocampus while mice performed the running task. Doing so had no effect on location-specific responses but completely disrupted lap-specific ones, suggesting place and event encoding can be separately manipulated—even though the same cells process both aspects of experience.

[…] “There’s no demonstration that these event-related patterns exist the first time an animal experiences a set of events—only that they appear after many repeats of a now familiar sequence,” Frank says. “This is not really the same as our episodic memories, where each new experience gets encoded separately and stored as an event the first (and often only) time it happens.” He thinks the cells represent “well-learned and relevant elements of an experience with repeating elements.”

Read the following passage and answer the questions given below

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you: ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’

Readers are supposed to judge that the violinist, despite having as much right to life as anyone else, doesn’t thereby have the right to use the body and organs of someone who hasn’t consented to this - even if this is the only way for him to remain alive. This is supposed to imply that, even if it is admitted that the foetus has a right to life, it doesn’t yet follow that it has a right to the means to survive where that involves the use of an unconsenting other’s body.

Faced with people who don’t ‘get’ a thought experiment, the temptation for philosophers is to say that these people aren’t sufficiently good at isolating what is ethically relevant. Obviously, such a response risks being self-serving, and tends to gloss over an important question: how should we determine what are the ethically relevant features of a situation?

Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.

Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment’s actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don’t pull it.

Ethical thought experiments work best when those who read them are willing to go along with the arbitrary stipulations of the author. The greater one’s contextual expertise, the more likely one is to suffer the problem of ‘too much knowledge’ when faced with thought experiments stipulating facts and circumstances that make little sense given one’s domain-specific experience. So, while philosophers tend to assume that they make ethical choices clearer and more rigorous by moving them on to abstract and context-free territory, such gains are likely to be experienced as losses in clarity by those with relevant situational expertise.

Read the following passage and answer the questions given below

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you: ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’

Readers are supposed to judge that the violinist, despite having as much right to life as anyone else, doesn’t thereby have the right to use the body and organs of someone who hasn’t consented to this - even if this is the only way for him to remain alive. This is supposed to imply that, even if it is admitted that the foetus has a right to life, it doesn’t yet follow that it has a right to the means to survive where that involves the use of an unconsenting other’s body.

Faced with people who don’t ‘get’ a thought experiment, the temptation for philosophers is to say that these people aren’t sufficiently good at isolating what is ethically relevant. Obviously, such a response risks being self-serving, and tends to gloss over an important question: how should we determine what are the ethically relevant features of a situation?

Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.

Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment’s actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don’t pull it.

Ethical thought experiments work best when those who read them are willing to go along with the arbitrary stipulations of the author. The greater one’s contextual expertise, the more likely one is to suffer the problem of ‘too much knowledge’ when faced with thought experiments stipulating facts and circumstances that make little sense given one’s domain-specific experience. So, while philosophers tend to assume that they make ethical choices clearer and more rigorous by moving them on to abstract and context-free territory, such gains are likely to be experienced as losses in clarity by those with relevant situational expertise.

Read the following passage and answer the questions given below

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you: ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’

Readers are supposed to judge that the violinist, despite having as much right to life as anyone else, doesn’t thereby have the right to use the body and organs of someone who hasn’t consented to this - even if this is the only way for him to remain alive. This is supposed to imply that, even if it is admitted that the foetus has a right to life, it doesn’t yet follow that it has a right to the means to survive where that involves the use of an unconsenting other’s body.

Faced with people who don’t ‘get’ a thought experiment, the temptation for philosophers is to say that these people aren’t sufficiently good at isolating what is ethically relevant. Obviously, such a response risks being self-serving, and tends to gloss over an important question: how should we determine what are the ethically relevant features of a situation?

Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.

Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment’s actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don’t pull it.

Ethical thought experiments work best when those who read them are willing to go along with the arbitrary stipulations of the author. The greater one’s contextual expertise, the more likely one is to suffer the problem of ‘too much knowledge’ when faced with thought experiments stipulating facts and circumstances that make little sense given one’s domain-specific experience. So, while philosophers tend to assume that they make ethical choices clearer and more rigorous by moving them on to abstract and context-free territory, such gains are likely to be experienced as losses in clarity by those with relevant situational expertise.

Read the following passage and answer the questions given below

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you: ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’

Readers are supposed to judge that the violinist, despite having as much right to life as anyone else, doesn’t thereby have the right to use the body and organs of someone who hasn’t consented to this - even if this is the only way for him to remain alive. This is supposed to imply that, even if it is admitted that the foetus has a right to life, it doesn’t yet follow that it has a right to the means to survive where that involves the use of an unconsenting other’s body.

Faced with people who don’t ‘get’ a thought experiment, the temptation for philosophers is to say that these people aren’t sufficiently good at isolating what is ethically relevant. Obviously, such a response risks being self-serving, and tends to gloss over an important question: how should we determine what are the ethically relevant features of a situation?

Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.

Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment’s actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don’t pull it.

Ethical thought experiments work best when those who read them are willing to go along with the arbitrary stipulations of the author. The greater one’s contextual expertise, the more likely one is to suffer the problem of ‘too much knowledge’ when faced with thought experiments stipulating facts and circumstances that make little sense given one’s domain-specific experience. So, while philosophers tend to assume that they make ethical choices clearer and more rigorous by moving them on to abstract and context-free territory, such gains are likely to be experienced as losses in clarity by those with relevant situational expertise.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Behind almost every plate of food is the work of perhaps a dozen or more farmers. Even in something as simple as a dish of pasta with tomato sauce, farmers grew the wheat for the pasta, and the tomatoes, basil, onion, garlic and olives needed to make the sauce. The farmers may be working in different farms, countries or even continents - the tomatoes, for instance, could be from Spain or from Kenya.

Much of the food we eat is the result of work by a huge number of farmers, growers and agricultural workers, but in many parts of the world, we simply pluck packets of food off supermarket shelves without giving this provenance a second thought. But the future of farming, and of farmers, is not as secure as we might expect. The odds are that the farmers who grew the food for your next meal have the majority of their careers behind them. In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 59. In Kenya, it is 60. And in Japan, with the highest average age for a farmer, it is 67. When this generation of experienced farmers retires, who will carry on putting food on the table after them? Young people are increasingly seeking work in the cities, sidelining agriculture. Without a new generation to take on the job, the global food supply begins to look very uncertain.

A number of solutions are emerging to tackle this ageing crisis in farming. Some of them involve creating new technologies to reduce farmers’ workload, so fewer people can get more done. Other solutions involve the arguably much harder challenge of tackling stigma around farming, and changing people’s minds to convince them that farming is a viable way of life.

One of the people trying to do that is Mary Nyale, programme coordinator for Farm Africa’s Growing Futures project in western Kenya. “Agriculture was used a lot in primary and secondary schools as a punishment,” says Nyale. “Anything bad you do in school, you would be told to go to a farm and till a bit of land.” When farming is seen as a punishment, agriculture becomes an unappealing career choice. It is often not seen as something worth doing for a living, especially among young people who do not have a family background in farming.

Nyale’s programme aims to overturn that way of thinking. More than 80% of Kenya’s population is under 35, and in 2018 nearly one in four young people were unemployed. Sustainably growing high-value crops is one route out of unemployment.

Thousands of young people are now learning to grow crops like French beans, mangetouts, kale, tomatoes and cabbages, through the Growing Futures programme. Each participant’s move into farming starts with the Growing Futures demonstration plot. The programme provides each person with seeds and fertiliser, and teaches them how to care for several different crops.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Behind almost every plate of food is the work of perhaps a dozen or more farmers. Even in something as simple as a dish of pasta with tomato sauce, farmers grew the wheat for the pasta, and the tomatoes, basil, onion, garlic and olives needed to make the sauce. The farmers may be working in different farms, countries or even continents - the tomatoes, for instance, could be from Spain or from Kenya.

Much of the food we eat is the result of work by a huge number of farmers, growers and agricultural workers, but in many parts of the world, we simply pluck packets of food off supermarket shelves without giving this provenance a second thought. But the future of farming, and of farmers, is not as secure as we might expect. The odds are that the farmers who grew the food for your next meal have the majority of their careers behind them. In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 59. In Kenya, it is 60. And in Japan, with the highest average age for a farmer, it is 67. When this generation of experienced farmers retires, who will carry on putting food on the table after them? Young people are increasingly seeking work in the cities, sidelining agriculture. Without a new generation to take on the job, the global food supply begins to look very uncertain.

A number of solutions are emerging to tackle this ageing crisis in farming. Some of them involve creating new technologies to reduce farmers’ workload, so fewer people can get more done. Other solutions involve the arguably much harder challenge of tackling stigma around farming, and changing people’s minds to convince them that farming is a viable way of life.

One of the people trying to do that is Mary Nyale, programme coordinator for Farm Africa’s Growing Futures project in western Kenya. “Agriculture was used a lot in primary and secondary schools as a punishment,” says Nyale. “Anything bad you do in school, you would be told to go to a farm and till a bit of land.” When farming is seen as a punishment, agriculture becomes an unappealing career choice. It is often not seen as something worth doing for a living, especially among young people who do not have a family background in farming.

Nyale’s programme aims to overturn that way of thinking. More than 80% of Kenya’s population is under 35, and in 2018 nearly one in four young people were unemployed. Sustainably growing high-value crops is one route out of unemployment.

Thousands of young people are now learning to grow crops like French beans, mangetouts, kale, tomatoes and cabbages, through the Growing Futures programme. Each participant’s move into farming starts with the Growing Futures demonstration plot. The programme provides each person with seeds and fertiliser, and teaches them how to care for several different crops.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Behind almost every plate of food is the work of perhaps a dozen or more farmers. Even in something as simple as a dish of pasta with tomato sauce, farmers grew the wheat for the pasta, and the tomatoes, basil, onion, garlic and olives needed to make the sauce. The farmers may be working in different farms, countries or even continents - the tomatoes, for instance, could be from Spain or from Kenya.

Much of the food we eat is the result of work by a huge number of farmers, growers and agricultural workers, but in many parts of the world, we simply pluck packets of food off supermarket shelves without giving this provenance a second thought. But the future of farming, and of farmers, is not as secure as we might expect. The odds are that the farmers who grew the food for your next meal have the majority of their careers behind them. In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 59. In Kenya, it is 60. And in Japan, with the highest average age for a farmer, it is 67. When this generation of experienced farmers retires, who will carry on putting food on the table after them? Young people are increasingly seeking work in the cities, sidelining agriculture. Without a new generation to take on the job, the global food supply begins to look very uncertain.

A number of solutions are emerging to tackle this ageing crisis in farming. Some of them involve creating new technologies to reduce farmers’ workload, so fewer people can get more done. Other solutions involve the arguably much harder challenge of tackling stigma around farming, and changing people’s minds to convince them that farming is a viable way of life.

One of the people trying to do that is Mary Nyale, programme coordinator for Farm Africa’s Growing Futures project in western Kenya. “Agriculture was used a lot in primary and secondary schools as a punishment,” says Nyale. “Anything bad you do in school, you would be told to go to a farm and till a bit of land.” When farming is seen as a punishment, agriculture becomes an unappealing career choice. It is often not seen as something worth doing for a living, especially among young people who do not have a family background in farming.

Nyale’s programme aims to overturn that way of thinking. More than 80% of Kenya’s population is under 35, and in 2018 nearly one in four young people were unemployed. Sustainably growing high-value crops is one route out of unemployment.

Thousands of young people are now learning to grow crops like French beans, mangetouts, kale, tomatoes and cabbages, through the Growing Futures programme. Each participant’s move into farming starts with the Growing Futures demonstration plot. The programme provides each person with seeds and fertiliser, and teaches them how to care for several different crops.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Behind almost every plate of food is the work of perhaps a dozen or more farmers. Even in something as simple as a dish of pasta with tomato sauce, farmers grew the wheat for the pasta, and the tomatoes, basil, onion, garlic and olives needed to make the sauce. The farmers may be working in different farms, countries or even continents - the tomatoes, for instance, could be from Spain or from Kenya.

Much of the food we eat is the result of work by a huge number of farmers, growers and agricultural workers, but in many parts of the world, we simply pluck packets of food off supermarket shelves without giving this provenance a second thought. But the future of farming, and of farmers, is not as secure as we might expect. The odds are that the farmers who grew the food for your next meal have the majority of their careers behind them. In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 59. In Kenya, it is 60. And in Japan, with the highest average age for a farmer, it is 67. When this generation of experienced farmers retires, who will carry on putting food on the table after them? Young people are increasingly seeking work in the cities, sidelining agriculture. Without a new generation to take on the job, the global food supply begins to look very uncertain.

A number of solutions are emerging to tackle this ageing crisis in farming. Some of them involve creating new technologies to reduce farmers’ workload, so fewer people can get more done. Other solutions involve the arguably much harder challenge of tackling stigma around farming, and changing people’s minds to convince them that farming is a viable way of life.

One of the people trying to do that is Mary Nyale, programme coordinator for Farm Africa’s Growing Futures project in western Kenya. “Agriculture was used a lot in primary and secondary schools as a punishment,” says Nyale. “Anything bad you do in school, you would be told to go to a farm and till a bit of land.” When farming is seen as a punishment, agriculture becomes an unappealing career choice. It is often not seen as something worth doing for a living, especially among young people who do not have a family background in farming.

Nyale’s programme aims to overturn that way of thinking. More than 80% of Kenya’s population is under 35, and in 2018 nearly one in four young people were unemployed. Sustainably growing high-value crops is one route out of unemployment.

Thousands of young people are now learning to grow crops like French beans, mangetouts, kale, tomatoes and cabbages, through the Growing Futures programme. Each participant’s move into farming starts with the Growing Futures demonstration plot. The programme provides each person with seeds and fertiliser, and teaches them how to care for several different crops.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Now isn’t the time to talk about inequality. That was the message the British government sent out when it suspended companies’ annual legal duty to publish their gender pay gap—a week before the deadline. Soon after, the political adviser turned journalist Sonia Sodha received fierce backlash for noting that a disproportionate number of the British doctors dying from the coronavirus pandemic come from ethnic minorities. This isn’t the time to talk about race, she was told because brave health-care workers of every ethnicity are losing their lives.

The collection of data on race and gender is an easy target for those who style themselves as champions of small government or cutting red tape and easing “burdensome” regulation. But without it, policymakers are unable to see the full impact of their decisions—and the media and the opposition are less equipped to hold them to account.

That matters because this will be the second successive decade in which the aftermath of a major economic shock shapes government decisions. In Britain, the 2010s were the austerity decade, as the fallout from the financial crisis led to successive Conservative governments cutting public spending, freezing benefits, and blaming any unpopular decisions on the fact that there was “no money left.” The next 10 years —the coronavirus decade—will be even more shaped by the global pandemic than the past were shaped by the financial crash. After weeks of lockdown, the global economy is in free fall. Oil prices have plummeted. Air travel has slowed to a trickle. Post-crash austerity fell harder on women, who tended to pick up the slack from cuts to children’s services and care for the elderly, damaging their earning potential as a result. In Britain today, women make up the majority of low earners, according to the Women’s Budget Group, an independent think tank. Nine out of ten single parents are mothers and half of all single parents are living in poverty.

In light of this, measuring the gender pay gap would seem to give us an important insight into an economic recovery after the pandemic. But not to commentators such as Daniel Hannan. The Conservative politician called pre-pandemic concerns about social mobility “petty,” and added: “When a million more people are [unemployed], does anyone think it will be a priority to publish gender pay gaps?”A few weeks earlier, the journalist Tom Welsh claimed that “the war on coronavirus has, in part, made the war on plastic redundant.” Both reflect an emerging strain of thought that suggests the economic deprivations heading toward Western societies mean that economic growth must be prioritized over every other concern. Hannan’s prescription was an end to environmentalism and other “regulations that inhibit growth … Even the minimum wage will be hard to justify if millions of people are looking for work.”

All this is framed as ending the “petty” obsessions of the culture wars. But it isn’t a cease-fire; it is a demand that the left concede defeat. The current crisis might instead prompt us to ask whether companies domiciled in tax havens have any right to come crying to governments for a handout. We might question how far ordinary taxpayers should be expected to guarantee Richard Branson’s billions. We might suggest that, actually, for women who are underpaid, eradicating the gender pay gap is rather important.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Now isn’t the time to talk about inequality. That was the message the British government sent out when it suspended companies’ annual legal duty to publish their gender pay gap—a week before the deadline. Soon after, the political adviser turned journalist Sonia Sodha received fierce backlash for noting that a disproportionate number of the British doctors dying from the coronavirus pandemic come from ethnic minorities. This isn’t the time to talk about race, she was told because brave health-care workers of every ethnicity are losing their lives.

The collection of data on race and gender is an easy target for those who style themselves as champions of small government or cutting red tape and easing “burdensome” regulation. But without it, policymakers are unable to see the full impact of their decisions—and the media and the opposition are less equipped to hold them to account.

That matters because this will be the second successive decade in which the aftermath of a major economic shock shapes government decisions. In Britain, the 2010s were the austerity decade, as the fallout from the financial crisis led to successive Conservative governments cutting public spending, freezing benefits, and blaming any unpopular decisions on the fact that there was “no money left.” The next 10 years —the coronavirus decade—will be even more shaped by the global pandemic than the past were shaped by the financial crash. After weeks of lockdown, the global economy is in free fall. Oil prices have plummeted. Air travel has slowed to a trickle. Post-crash austerity fell harder on women, who tended to pick up the slack from cuts to children’s services and care for the elderly, damaging their earning potential as a result. In Britain today, women make up the majority of low earners, according to the Women’s Budget Group, an independent think tank. Nine out of ten single parents are mothers and half of all single parents are living in poverty.

In light of this, measuring the gender pay gap would seem to give us an important insight into an economic recovery after the pandemic. But not to commentators such as Daniel Hannan. The Conservative politician called pre-pandemic concerns about social mobility “petty,” and added: “When a million more people are [unemployed], does anyone think it will be a priority to publish gender pay gaps?”A few weeks earlier, the journalist Tom Welsh claimed that “the war on coronavirus has, in part, made the war on plastic redundant.” Both reflect an emerging strain of thought that suggests the economic deprivations heading toward Western societies mean that economic growth must be prioritized over every other concern. Hannan’s prescription was an end to environmentalism and other “regulations that inhibit growth … Even the minimum wage will be hard to justify if millions of people are looking for work.”

All this is framed as ending the “petty” obsessions of the culture wars. But it isn’t a cease-fire; it is a demand that the left concede defeat. The current crisis might instead prompt us to ask whether companies domiciled in tax havens have any right to come crying to governments for a handout. We might question how far ordinary taxpayers should be expected to guarantee Richard Branson’s billions. We might suggest that, actually, for women who are underpaid, eradicating the gender pay gap is rather important.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Now isn’t the time to talk about inequality. That was the message the British government sent out when it suspended companies’ annual legal duty to publish their gender pay gap—a week before the deadline. Soon after, the political adviser turned journalist Sonia Sodha received fierce backlash for noting that a disproportionate number of the British doctors dying from the coronavirus pandemic come from ethnic minorities. This isn’t the time to talk about race, she was told because brave health-care workers of every ethnicity are losing their lives.

The collection of data on race and gender is an easy target for those who style themselves as champions of small government or cutting red tape and easing “burdensome” regulation. But without it, policymakers are unable to see the full impact of their decisions—and the media and the opposition are less equipped to hold them to account.

That matters because this will be the second successive decade in which the aftermath of a major economic shock shapes government decisions. In Britain, the 2010s were the austerity decade, as the fallout from the financial crisis led to successive Conservative governments cutting public spending, freezing benefits, and blaming any unpopular decisions on the fact that there was “no money left.” The next 10 years —the coronavirus decade—will be even more shaped by the global pandemic than the past were shaped by the financial crash. After weeks of lockdown, the global economy is in free fall. Oil prices have plummeted. Air travel has slowed to a trickle. Post-crash austerity fell harder on women, who tended to pick up the slack from cuts to children’s services and care for the elderly, damaging their earning potential as a result. In Britain today, women make up the majority of low earners, according to the Women’s Budget Group, an independent think tank. Nine out of ten single parents are mothers and half of all single parents are living in poverty.

In light of this, measuring the gender pay gap would seem to give us an important insight into an economic recovery after the pandemic. But not to commentators such as Daniel Hannan. The Conservative politician called pre-pandemic concerns about social mobility “petty,” and added: “When a million more people are [unemployed], does anyone think it will be a priority to publish gender pay gaps?”A few weeks earlier, the journalist Tom Welsh claimed that “the war on coronavirus has, in part, made the war on plastic redundant.” Both reflect an emerging strain of thought that suggests the economic deprivations heading toward Western societies mean that economic growth must be prioritized over every other concern. Hannan’s prescription was an end to environmentalism and other “regulations that inhibit growth … Even the minimum wage will be hard to justify if millions of people are looking for work.”

All this is framed as ending the “petty” obsessions of the culture wars. But it isn’t a cease-fire; it is a demand that the left concede defeat. The current crisis might instead prompt us to ask whether companies domiciled in tax havens have any right to come crying to governments for a handout. We might question how far ordinary taxpayers should be expected to guarantee Richard Branson’s billions. We might suggest that, actually, for women who are underpaid, eradicating the gender pay gap is rather important.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Now isn’t the time to talk about inequality. That was the message the British government sent out when it suspended companies’ annual legal duty to publish their gender pay gap—a week before the deadline. Soon after, the political adviser turned journalist Sonia Sodha received fierce backlash for noting that a disproportionate number of the British doctors dying from the coronavirus pandemic come from ethnic minorities. This isn’t the time to talk about race, she was told because brave health-care workers of every ethnicity are losing their lives.

The collection of data on race and gender is an easy target for those who style themselves as champions of small government or cutting red tape and easing “burdensome” regulation. But without it, policymakers are unable to see the full impact of their decisions—and the media and the opposition are less equipped to hold them to account.

That matters because this will be the second successive decade in which the aftermath of a major economic shock shapes government decisions. In Britain, the 2010s were the austerity decade, as the fallout from the financial crisis led to successive Conservative governments cutting public spending, freezing benefits, and blaming any unpopular decisions on the fact that there was “no money left.” The next 10 years —the coronavirus decade—will be even more shaped by the global pandemic than the past were shaped by the financial crash. After weeks of lockdown, the global economy is in free fall. Oil prices have plummeted. Air travel has slowed to a trickle. Post-crash austerity fell harder on women, who tended to pick up the slack from cuts to children’s services and care for the elderly, damaging their earning potential as a result. In Britain today, women make up the majority of low earners, according to the Women’s Budget Group, an independent think tank. Nine out of ten single parents are mothers and half of all single parents are living in poverty.

In light of this, measuring the gender pay gap would seem to give us an important insight into an economic recovery after the pandemic. But not to commentators such as Daniel Hannan. The Conservative politician called pre-pandemic concerns about social mobility “petty,” and added: “When a million more people are [unemployed], does anyone think it will be a priority to publish gender pay gaps?”A few weeks earlier, the journalist Tom Welsh claimed that “the war on coronavirus has, in part, made the war on plastic redundant.” Both reflect an emerging strain of thought that suggests the economic deprivations heading toward Western societies mean that economic growth must be prioritized over every other concern. Hannan’s prescription was an end to environmentalism and other “regulations that inhibit growth … Even the minimum wage will be hard to justify if millions of people are looking for work.”

All this is framed as ending the “petty” obsessions of the culture wars. But it isn’t a cease-fire; it is a demand that the left concede defeat. The current crisis might instead prompt us to ask whether companies domiciled in tax havens have any right to come crying to governments for a handout. We might question how far ordinary taxpayers should be expected to guarantee Richard Branson’s billions. We might suggest that, actually, for women who are underpaid, eradicating the gender pay gap is rather important.