Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 7

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten - it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

But as a behavioural scientist, I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem - but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

Some - Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example - have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule-breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles - even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to "castle" to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule. But would chess or football without rules be chess or football - would they be entirely formless and meaningless activities? Indeed, is a game with no rules is a game at all? Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games - telling us what "moves" we can, and can't, make. The conventions of "pleases" and "thank yous" that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary - but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queueing, not littering, picking up our dog's deposits and so on fall into the same category. They (rules) are the building blocks of a harmonious society. Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: anarchy. The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable - humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten - it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

But as a behavioural scientist, I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem - but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

Some - Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example - have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule-breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles - even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to "castle" to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule. But would chess or football without rules be chess or football - would they be entirely formless and meaningless activities? Indeed, is a game with no rules is a game at all? Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games - telling us what "moves" we can, and can't, make. The conventions of "pleases" and "thank yous" that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary - but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queueing, not littering, picking up our dog's deposits and so on fall into the same category. They (rules) are the building blocks of a harmonious society. Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: anarchy. The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable - humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten - it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

But as a behavioural scientist, I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem - but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

Some - Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example - have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule-breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles - even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to "castle" to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule. But would chess or football without rules be chess or football - would they be entirely formless and meaningless activities? Indeed, is a game with no rules is a game at all? Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games - telling us what "moves" we can, and can't, make. The conventions of "pleases" and "thank yous" that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary - but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queueing, not littering, picking up our dog's deposits and so on fall into the same category. They (rules) are the building blocks of a harmonious society. Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: anarchy. The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable - humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten - it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

But as a behavioural scientist, I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem - but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

Some - Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example - have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule-breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles - even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to "castle" to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule. But would chess or football without rules be chess or football - would they be entirely formless and meaningless activities? Indeed, is a game with no rules is a game at all? Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games - telling us what "moves" we can, and can't, make. The conventions of "pleases" and "thank yous" that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary - but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queueing, not littering, picking up our dog's deposits and so on fall into the same category. They (rules) are the building blocks of a harmonious society. Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: anarchy. The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable - humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Have you recently become a self-proclaimed houseplant parent? Seen your social media feed flood with millennial pink kitchenware and bookshelves organised by colour? Or browsed your favourite clothing brand and found that they’ve started up a new homeware department full of brightly patterned throws and rose gold cutlery?

While once our clothes were the ultimate signifier of our personal style, our houses are increasingly becoming things to be showcased. Search #interiordesign on Instagram and you’ll discover almost 90 million perfectly curated posts of colour-coordinated bedrooms and bright-white painted living rooms. Private spheres of our lives once only shared with our closest friends and the occasional house guest are now designed for public consumption.

“Everyone is becoming more concerned with how their homes look,” says Alessandra Wood, a design historian and vice-president of style at Modsy. “We’ve seen a change in the type of furniture that becomes much more stylish and on-trend. The opening price point range is no longer sad and dumpy, but actually driving many blogger and influencer trends - much like fast fashion.”

Yet while the Instagram aesthetic might have inspired new interest in home decoration, fewer and fewer of us are personalising properties that we can call our own. Soaring house prices and stagnating wages have led to a bloated rental market in Europe and the US, with just 37% of 24-35 years old Americans owning their home (compared to 43% in 2005). In the UK this is even lower, with just 34% of people in the same age group owning property (compared to 55% in 1996).It is clear that millennials and Gen Z are now renting at record rates, yet the appetite to make a house a home remains equally high. While picking out the perfect shade for the living room or putting down new carpets might have been important interior choices for their parents, young people are increasingly finding more temporary solutions to the challenge of making a rental home #interiorinspo worthy without falling foul of their landlords.

“A house is home whether it’s rented or not,” says renter Chelsey Brown, 27, who resides in New York. “Many people are reluctant to design their spaces due to renter restrictions, but I don’t allow any rental I live in to confine me to what I can or can’t do. For example, I’ve always wanted wall panelling in my home and so I figured out a way to install temporary wainscoting. Additionally, I’ve always dreamed of having a white, marble kitchen and I achieved that look in my own rental by using removable, peel-and-stick products.”

For some young renters, personalising a home can come down to affordable, stylish additions. Houseplant sales have surged almost 50% in the US over the last three years, and mass-market retailers such as Zara, ASOS and H&M have all recently launched homeware ranges, focusing largely on smaller items like vases, cushions and candles that are easy to incorporate into an already furnished space. Brown is currently working on a range of removable products for renters, such as stick-on floor tiles and removable backsplashes inspired by her own experience of overhauling a rental property.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Have you recently become a self-proclaimed houseplant parent? Seen your social media feed flood with millennial pink kitchenware and bookshelves organised by colour? Or browsed your favourite clothing brand and found that they’ve started up a new homeware department full of brightly patterned throws and rose gold cutlery?

While once our clothes were the ultimate signifier of our personal style, our houses are increasingly becoming things to be showcased. Search #interiordesign on Instagram and you’ll discover almost 90 million perfectly curated posts of colour-coordinated bedrooms and bright-white painted living rooms. Private spheres of our lives once only shared with our closest friends and the occasional house guest are now designed for public consumption.

“Everyone is becoming more concerned with how their homes look,” says Alessandra Wood, a design historian and vice-president of style at Modsy. “We’ve seen a change in the type of furniture that becomes much more stylish and on-trend. The opening price point range is no longer sad and dumpy, but actually driving many blogger and influencer trends - much like fast fashion.”

Yet while the Instagram aesthetic might have inspired new interest in home decoration, fewer and fewer of us are personalising properties that we can call our own. Soaring house prices and stagnating wages have led to a bloated rental market in Europe and the US, with just 37% of 24-35 years old Americans owning their home (compared to 43% in 2005). In the UK this is even lower, with just 34% of people in the same age group owning property (compared to 55% in 1996).It is clear that millennials and Gen Z are now renting at record rates, yet the appetite to make a house a home remains equally high. While picking out the perfect shade for the living room or putting down new carpets might have been important interior choices for their parents, young people are increasingly finding more temporary solutions to the challenge of making a rental home #interiorinspo worthy without falling foul of their landlords.

“A house is home whether it’s rented or not,” says renter Chelsey Brown, 27, who resides in New York. “Many people are reluctant to design their spaces due to renter restrictions, but I don’t allow any rental I live in to confine me to what I can or can’t do. For example, I’ve always wanted wall panelling in my home and so I figured out a way to install temporary wainscoting. Additionally, I’ve always dreamed of having a white, marble kitchen and I achieved that look in my own rental by using removable, peel-and-stick products.”

For some young renters, personalising a home can come down to affordable, stylish additions. Houseplant sales have surged almost 50% in the US over the last three years, and mass-market retailers such as Zara, ASOS and H&M have all recently launched homeware ranges, focusing largely on smaller items like vases, cushions and candles that are easy to incorporate into an already furnished space. Brown is currently working on a range of removable products for renters, such as stick-on floor tiles and removable backsplashes inspired by her own experience of overhauling a rental property.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Have you recently become a self-proclaimed houseplant parent? Seen your social media feed flood with millennial pink kitchenware and bookshelves organised by colour? Or browsed your favourite clothing brand and found that they’ve started up a new homeware department full of brightly patterned throws and rose gold cutlery?

While once our clothes were the ultimate signifier of our personal style, our houses are increasingly becoming things to be showcased. Search #interiordesign on Instagram and you’ll discover almost 90 million perfectly curated posts of colour-coordinated bedrooms and bright-white painted living rooms. Private spheres of our lives once only shared with our closest friends and the occasional house guest are now designed for public consumption.

“Everyone is becoming more concerned with how their homes look,” says Alessandra Wood, a design historian and vice-president of style at Modsy. “We’ve seen a change in the type of furniture that becomes much more stylish and on-trend. The opening price point range is no longer sad and dumpy, but actually driving many blogger and influencer trends - much like fast fashion.”

Yet while the Instagram aesthetic might have inspired new interest in home decoration, fewer and fewer of us are personalising properties that we can call our own. Soaring house prices and stagnating wages have led to a bloated rental market in Europe and the US, with just 37% of 24-35 years old Americans owning their home (compared to 43% in 2005). In the UK this is even lower, with just 34% of people in the same age group owning property (compared to 55% in 1996).It is clear that millennials and Gen Z are now renting at record rates, yet the appetite to make a house a home remains equally high. While picking out the perfect shade for the living room or putting down new carpets might have been important interior choices for their parents, young people are increasingly finding more temporary solutions to the challenge of making a rental home #interiorinspo worthy without falling foul of their landlords.

“A house is home whether it’s rented or not,” says renter Chelsey Brown, 27, who resides in New York. “Many people are reluctant to design their spaces due to renter restrictions, but I don’t allow any rental I live in to confine me to what I can or can’t do. For example, I’ve always wanted wall panelling in my home and so I figured out a way to install temporary wainscoting. Additionally, I’ve always dreamed of having a white, marble kitchen and I achieved that look in my own rental by using removable, peel-and-stick products.”

For some young renters, personalising a home can come down to affordable, stylish additions. Houseplant sales have surged almost 50% in the US over the last three years, and mass-market retailers such as Zara, ASOS and H&M have all recently launched homeware ranges, focusing largely on smaller items like vases, cushions and candles that are easy to incorporate into an already furnished space. Brown is currently working on a range of removable products for renters, such as stick-on floor tiles and removable backsplashes inspired by her own experience of overhauling a rental property.

Read the passage and answer the following questions:

Have you recently become a self-proclaimed houseplant parent? Seen your social media feed flood with millennial pink kitchenware and bookshelves organised by colour? Or browsed your favourite clothing brand and found that they’ve started up a new homeware department full of brightly patterned throws and rose gold cutlery?

While once our clothes were the ultimate signifier of our personal style, our houses are increasingly becoming things to be showcased. Search #interiordesign on Instagram and you’ll discover almost 90 million perfectly curated posts of colour-coordinated bedrooms and bright-white painted living rooms. Private spheres of our lives once only shared with our closest friends and the occasional house guest are now designed for public consumption.

“Everyone is becoming more concerned with how their homes look,” says Alessandra Wood, a design historian and vice-president of style at Modsy. “We’ve seen a change in the type of furniture that becomes much more stylish and on-trend. The opening price point range is no longer sad and dumpy, but actually driving many blogger and influencer trends - much like fast fashion.”

Yet while the Instagram aesthetic might have inspired new interest in home decoration, fewer and fewer of us are personalising properties that we can call our own. Soaring house prices and stagnating wages have led to a bloated rental market in Europe and the US, with just 37% of 24-35 years old Americans owning their home (compared to 43% in 2005). In the UK this is even lower, with just 34% of people in the same age group owning property (compared to 55% in 1996).It is clear that millennials and Gen Z are now renting at record rates, yet the appetite to make a house a home remains equally high. While picking out the perfect shade for the living room or putting down new carpets might have been important interior choices for their parents, young people are increasingly finding more temporary solutions to the challenge of making a rental home #interiorinspo worthy without falling foul of their landlords.

“A house is home whether it’s rented or not,” says renter Chelsey Brown, 27, who resides in New York. “Many people are reluctant to design their spaces due to renter restrictions, but I don’t allow any rental I live in to confine me to what I can or can’t do. For example, I’ve always wanted wall panelling in my home and so I figured out a way to install temporary wainscoting. Additionally, I’ve always dreamed of having a white, marble kitchen and I achieved that look in my own rental by using removable, peel-and-stick products.”

For some young renters, personalising a home can come down to affordable, stylish additions. Houseplant sales have surged almost 50% in the US over the last three years, and mass-market retailers such as Zara, ASOS and H&M have all recently launched homeware ranges, focusing largely on smaller items like vases, cushions and candles that are easy to incorporate into an already furnished space. Brown is currently working on a range of removable products for renters, such as stick-on floor tiles and removable backsplashes inspired by her own experience of overhauling a rental property.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Phrenology (determining an individual's psychological attributes based on skeletal features), and phrenologists in general, have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for non-convicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm’s ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new preface to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a ‘serious oversight’. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were ‘deeply baffled’ at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended ‘for pure academic discussions’.

Notably, the researchers don’t comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect - making a person’s ‘criminal’ appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don’t back down on the assumption that ‘being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits’. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled ‘criminal’ is hardly value-neutral.

One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.

The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy (the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics) is fair game for the purposes of ‘pure academic discussion’. The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns - but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators argue that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few non-harmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures - and when the only thing it’s capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures - it’s hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity’s sake.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Phrenology (determining an individual's psychological attributes based on skeletal features), and phrenologists in general, have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for non-convicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm’s ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new preface to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a ‘serious oversight’. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were ‘deeply baffled’ at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended ‘for pure academic discussions’.

Notably, the researchers don’t comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect - making a person’s ‘criminal’ appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don’t back down on the assumption that ‘being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits’. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled ‘criminal’ is hardly value-neutral.

One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.

The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy (the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics) is fair game for the purposes of ‘pure academic discussion’. The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns - but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators argue that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few non-harmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures - and when the only thing it’s capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures - it’s hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity’s sake.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Phrenology (determining an individual's psychological attributes based on skeletal features), and phrenologists in general, have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for non-convicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm’s ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new preface to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a ‘serious oversight’. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were ‘deeply baffled’ at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended ‘for pure academic discussions’.

Notably, the researchers don’t comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect - making a person’s ‘criminal’ appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don’t back down on the assumption that ‘being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits’. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled ‘criminal’ is hardly value-neutral.

One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.

The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy (the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics) is fair game for the purposes of ‘pure academic discussion’. The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns - but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators argue that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few non-harmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures - and when the only thing it’s capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures - it’s hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity’s sake.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Phrenology (determining an individual's psychological attributes based on skeletal features), and phrenologists in general, have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for non-convicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm’s ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new preface to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a ‘serious oversight’. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were ‘deeply baffled’ at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended ‘for pure academic discussions’.

Notably, the researchers don’t comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect - making a person’s ‘criminal’ appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don’t back down on the assumption that ‘being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits’. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled ‘criminal’ is hardly value-neutral.

One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.

The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy (the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics) is fair game for the purposes of ‘pure academic discussion’. The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns - but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators argue that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few non-harmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures - and when the only thing it’s capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures - it’s hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity’s sake.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19 which broke out in China, could not have been more predictable. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017, I wrote a feature story for TIME magazine on the subject. The magazine cover read: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”.

There was little special about my insight. Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of articles and white papers issuing dire warnings that a global pandemic involving a new respiratory disease was only a matter of time. On BBC Future in 2018, we reported that experts believed a flu pandemic was only a matter of time and that there could be millions of undiscovered viruses in the world, with one expert telling us, “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good.” In 2019, US President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic exercise named “Crimson Contagion”, which imagined a flu pandemic starting in China and spreading around the world. The simulation predicted that 586,000 people would die in the US alone. If the most pessimistic estimates about COVID-19 come true, the far better named “Crimson Contagion” will seem like a day in the park.

As of 26 March, there were more than 470,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world and more than 20,000 deaths, touching every continent save Antarctica. This was a pandemic, in reality, well before the World Health Organization finally declared it one on 11 March. And we should have seen it coming. COVID-19 marks the return of a very old - and familiar - enemy. Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than the viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease. Not natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes. Not war - not even close. Take the mosquito-borne disease malaria. It has stalked humanity for thousands of years, and by one estimate has killed half of all humans who have ever lived. While death tolls have dropped significantly over the past 20 years, it still snuffs out nearly half a million people every year.

Over the millennia, epidemics, in particular, have been mass killers on a scale we can’t begin to imagine today - even in the time of the coronavirus. The plague of Justinian struck in the 6th Century and killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half the global population at the time. The Black Death of the 14th Century - likely caused by the same pathogen - may have killed up to 200 million people. Smallpox may have killed as many as 300 million people in the 20th Century alone, even though an effective vaccine - the world’s first - had been available since 1796. About 100 million people died in the 1918 influenza pandemic - numbers that surpass the death toll of World War One, which was being fought at the same time. The 1918 flu virus infected nearly 600million people on the planet. HIV, a pandemic that is still with us and still lacks a vaccine, has killed an estimated 32 million people and infected 75 million, with more added every day.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19 which broke out in China, could not have been more predictable. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017, I wrote a feature story for TIME magazine on the subject. The magazine cover read: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”.

There was little special about my insight. Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of articles and white papers issuing dire warnings that a global pandemic involving a new respiratory disease was only a matter of time. On BBC Future in 2018, we reported that experts believed a flu pandemic was only a matter of time and that there could be millions of undiscovered viruses in the world, with one expert telling us, “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good.” In 2019, US President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic exercise named “Crimson Contagion”, which imagined a flu pandemic starting in China and spreading around the world. The simulation predicted that 586,000 people would die in the US alone. If the most pessimistic estimates about COVID-19 come true, the far better named “Crimson Contagion” will seem like a day in the park.

As of 26 March, there were more than 470,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world and more than 20,000 deaths, touching every continent save Antarctica. This was a pandemic, in reality, well before the World Health Organization finally declared it one on 11 March. And we should have seen it coming. COVID-19 marks the return of a very old - and familiar - enemy. Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than the viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease. Not natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes. Not war - not even close. Take the mosquito-borne disease malaria. It has stalked humanity for thousands of years, and by one estimate has killed half of all humans who have ever lived. While death tolls have dropped significantly over the past 20 years, it still snuffs out nearly half a million people every year.

Over the millennia, epidemics, in particular, have been mass killers on a scale we can’t begin to imagine today - even in the time of the coronavirus. The plague of Justinian struck in the 6th Century and killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half the global population at the time. The Black Death of the 14th Century - likely caused by the same pathogen - may have killed up to 200 million people. Smallpox may have killed as many as 300 million people in the 20th Century alone, even though an effective vaccine - the world’s first - had been available since 1796. About 100 million people died in the 1918 influenza pandemic - numbers that surpass the death toll of World War One, which was being fought at the same time. The 1918 flu virus infected nearly 600million people on the planet. HIV, a pandemic that is still with us and still lacks a vaccine, has killed an estimated 32 million people and infected 75 million, with more added every day.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19 which broke out in China, could not have been more predictable. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017, I wrote a feature story for TIME magazine on the subject. The magazine cover read: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”.

There was little special about my insight. Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of articles and white papers issuing dire warnings that a global pandemic involving a new respiratory disease was only a matter of time. On BBC Future in 2018, we reported that experts believed a flu pandemic was only a matter of time and that there could be millions of undiscovered viruses in the world, with one expert telling us, “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good.” In 2019, US President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic exercise named “Crimson Contagion”, which imagined a flu pandemic starting in China and spreading around the world. The simulation predicted that 586,000 people would die in the US alone. If the most pessimistic estimates about COVID-19 come true, the far better named “Crimson Contagion” will seem like a day in the park.

As of 26 March, there were more than 470,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world and more than 20,000 deaths, touching every continent save Antarctica. This was a pandemic, in reality, well before the World Health Organization finally declared it one on 11 March. And we should have seen it coming. COVID-19 marks the return of a very old - and familiar - enemy. Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than the viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease. Not natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes. Not war - not even close. Take the mosquito-borne disease malaria. It has stalked humanity for thousands of years, and by one estimate has killed half of all humans who have ever lived. While death tolls have dropped significantly over the past 20 years, it still snuffs out nearly half a million people every year.

Over the millennia, epidemics, in particular, have been mass killers on a scale we can’t begin to imagine today - even in the time of the coronavirus. The plague of Justinian struck in the 6th Century and killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half the global population at the time. The Black Death of the 14th Century - likely caused by the same pathogen - may have killed up to 200 million people. Smallpox may have killed as many as 300 million people in the 20th Century alone, even though an effective vaccine - the world’s first - had been available since 1796. About 100 million people died in the 1918 influenza pandemic - numbers that surpass the death toll of World War One, which was being fought at the same time. The 1918 flu virus infected nearly 600million people on the planet. HIV, a pandemic that is still with us and still lacks a vaccine, has killed an estimated 32 million people and infected 75 million, with more added every day.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19 which broke out in China, could not have been more predictable. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017, I wrote a feature story for TIME magazine on the subject. The magazine cover read: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”.

There was little special about my insight. Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of articles and white papers issuing dire warnings that a global pandemic involving a new respiratory disease was only a matter of time. On BBC Future in 2018, we reported that experts believed a flu pandemic was only a matter of time and that there could be millions of undiscovered viruses in the world, with one expert telling us, “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good.” In 2019, US President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic exercise named “Crimson Contagion”, which imagined a flu pandemic starting in China and spreading around the world. The simulation predicted that 586,000 people would die in the US alone. If the most pessimistic estimates about COVID-19 come true, the far better named “Crimson Contagion” will seem like a day in the park.

As of 26 March, there were more than 470,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world and more than 20,000 deaths, touching every continent save Antarctica. This was a pandemic, in reality, well before the World Health Organization finally declared it one on 11 March. And we should have seen it coming. COVID-19 marks the return of a very old - and familiar - enemy. Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than the viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease. Not natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes. Not war - not even close. Take the mosquito-borne disease malaria. It has stalked humanity for thousands of years, and by one estimate has killed half of all humans who have ever lived. While death tolls have dropped significantly over the past 20 years, it still snuffs out nearly half a million people every year.

Over the millennia, epidemics, in particular, have been mass killers on a scale we can’t begin to imagine today - even in the time of the coronavirus. The plague of Justinian struck in the 6th Century and killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half the global population at the time. The Black Death of the 14th Century - likely caused by the same pathogen - may have killed up to 200 million people. Smallpox may have killed as many as 300 million people in the 20th Century alone, even though an effective vaccine - the world’s first - had been available since 1796. About 100 million people died in the 1918 influenza pandemic - numbers that surpass the death toll of World War One, which was being fought at the same time. The 1918 flu virus infected nearly 600million people on the planet. HIV, a pandemic that is still with us and still lacks a vaccine, has killed an estimated 32 million people and infected 75 million, with more added every day.