NEW INTERMEDIATE READING FINAL TEST

Time allowed: 60 minutes

Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 2.

Questions 1-7
Reading passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i. Back to the ways things were in an Alaska’s town
ii. Types of people in the rural area that are vulnerable to the pandemic
iii. The escalation of a problem to a new height
iv. The serious results of re-opening with inadequate rates
v. Contrast between the behaviors of vaccinated and unvaccinated people
vi. A type of area that is vulnerable to potential outbreaks
vii. How a lack of strict measures can increase the risk of outbreaks
viii. Recovery amidst a precarious situation
ix. Other factors that contribute to a similar situation

1. Paragraph A
2. Paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph D
5. Paragraph E
6. Paragraph F
7. Paragraph G
 The next phase of the U.S. pandemic

A sudden surge in Fairbanks, Alaska, offers a cautionary tale for places that lift restrictions while local
vaccination rates remain low.

A. People in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city, have embraced a return to normalcy.

Alaska made national headlines in March as the first state to make vaccines available to any
adult, and as the snow melted into a long-awaited spring, restaurants were packed, church
pews were full, and schools reopened for in-person classes.

B. Yet signs of trouble became apparent before the trees had even budded. Demand for
vaccinations swiftly plateaued; in early April, clinics could no longer fill their appointments. In
the last two weeks of April, COVID-19 cases in the Fairbanks North Star Borough rose by 253
percent, and test positivity rates doubled to more than 10 percent. Fairbanks Memorial
Hospital, which serves the entire Alaskan Interior, was soon wrestling with its largest spike of
the pandemic.

C. No single outbreak or super-spreader event drove Fairbank’s surge, says Angelique

Ramirez, a physician and the chief medical officer of the main health care system in Fairbanks.
Rather, this spike is the inevitable result of reopening with low vaccination rates. As such, it’s a
grim preview of what could be the next phase of the pandemic in the United States. Ramirez
describes the surge as “sobering.” The hospital hit its capacity in early May, and for three days,
administrators had to consider whether they could care for every patient before admittance,
considering the possibility of sending cases as far away to other states as Anchorage and
Seattle.

D. Public health experts warn that even as continuing vaccinations reduce the daily number of
cases nationally, ongoing—and sometimes epidemic-scale—regional outbreaks will continue.”
Justin Lessler, a co-author of the report and an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health says that in scenarios where there is a low vaccination rate
and a lack of control measures—like in Fairbanks and much of rural America—“you start
seeing resurgence epidemics in late summer and fall. Lessler adds that the recent CDC
announcement that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks in public places has led
to “relaxing measures much more quickly, which could lead to significant resurgences.” The
concern is that because there is no easy way to verify who has been jabbed, unvaccinated
people may choose not to wear masks, increasing risk for themselves and others. In fact,
market-research firm Cardify looked at surveys and consumer spending and found that people
who don’t plan to get the vaccine were more likely to go out to restaurants, salons, and other
venues than those who have been vaccinated.

E. Future outbreaks will likely be centered around areas that are left vulnerable by low
vaccination rates. “Right now, we’re at the level that we were in June of last year. We
considered it horrific then, and now, we’re all opening up,” says Alan Morgan, chief executive
officer of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA). For some, vaccine hesitancy is the root
of the problem. NRHA recently conducted a survey of almost 200 hospitals and found that
even though healthcare workers have had access to shots for months, a third of rural hospitals
reported that less than half of their employees had been vaccinated. Morgan notes that may
cause a workforce problem if these employees get sick, making these communities less able to
respond to surges. “There’s a real risk of a slow burn in rural places which the country
ignores,” Morgan says. “The fact of the matter is I’m worried about rural America being a
reservoir for COVID. These are often areas with already fragile health-care systems. Rural
populations tend to be older, as well as health-compromised, whether from jobs with greater
occupational hazards, or from difficulties accessing preventative care, explains Tom Mueller,
assistant professor of sociology at Utah State University. “It’s hard to get rural healthcare, and
it’s likely only gotten worse during the pandemic,” he says.

F. Cities have similar equity issues, says Julia Raifman, who conducts research on health and
social policies as an assistant professor at Boston University. “It’s not really a surprise that
there are large racial and ethnic disparities in vaccinations,” she says. “That’s a logical result of
our prioritization policies.” She points to structural barriers, like the ability to take time off work
to recover from side effects, or transportation to get to vaccine appointments. Even being five
miles from a clinic, as the new administration says 90 percent of Americans now are, is a
hurdle if you don’t have access to a car. “I not only expect there will be outbreaks, but that the
people most affected will continue to be Black, Latinx, and Native American,” Raifman says.

G. The situation in Fairbanks is improving now; Ramirez says that as a low-density area, it
doesn’t take much to reduce transmission, highlighting the importance of behavior. But looking
ahead, Ramirez says she’s afraid COVID-19 is going to be an endemic disease in Alaska. “I
think we lost our chance,” she says, referring to Alaska’s plateauing vaccination rates. “Which
really brings home that until we have a significant number of people vaccinated, or people
wear masks, we are still at risk.”

Questions 21-26

Reading passage 1 has seven sections A-G.

Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 8-13 of your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once

8. The way some people can take advantage of a fault in the regulation
9. Possible scenarios for the handling of patients
10. Figures on the spread of a disease
11. A survey conducted on a number of health facilities
12. Types of people that are disadvantaged by the vaccination policy
13. Places where one category of people frequent more than the other
Reading Passage 2

SLOW AGING
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

This nugget of wisdom, often attributed to Mark Twain, has been turned into many inspirational
internet memes over the years. But according to a growing body of research, there is more to it
than that. Subjective age – how old we feel – has a very real impact on health and longevity.
People who feel younger than their years often actually are indeed younger, in terms of how
long they have left to live.

The question of what controls our subjective age, and whether we can change it, has always
been tricky to address scientifically. Now, research is revealing some surprising answers. The
good news is that many of the factors that help determine how old we feel are things that we
can control to add years to our lives –and life to our years.

We have known for a while now that simply counting the number of years someone has been
alive isn’t necessarily the most accurate way of gauging longevity. Biological “aging clocks”
measure various markers in the body to see how far along the physical aging process we are.
But we also know that physical aging is not the be-all and end-all. Gerontologists recognise
that just as we can make generalizations about the ways that physical aging affects our bodies
– a 60-year-old will almost certainly show more signs of physical decline than a 30-year-old –
there are some predictable psychological changes that come with age, too.
In the late 1990s, Laura Carstensen, a gerontologist at Stanford University in California,
measured how human psychology typically changes as we age. Her work has shown that
young people, for whom time seems unlimited, are motivated to pursue knowledge about the
physical and social world – to explore and make new connections. As a result, they tend to be
more enthusiastic, outward-looking and sociable than their parents and grandparents, but also
more superficial, impulsive and emotionally fragile. Older people, meanwhile, feeling that they
have fewer years left to play with, turn away from exploring and concentrate on finding
meaning, emotional intimacy and sharing the wisdom of their years.

Even within this general psychological trajectory, however, subjective age varies considerably.
This isn’t terribly surprising: we all know people who are young at heart and young fogeys who
think and behave older than their years. Intriguingly, though, studies suggest that being young
at heart is seriously good for you. A lower subjective age is correlated with health, longevity
and general well-being, while people with a greater subjective age have higher levels of
inflammation, a marker of general ill health, and older-looking brains. A 2018 paper by Antonio
Terracciano at Florida State University and his colleagues, looked at data from three studies
following more than 17,000 people for up to 20 years. They confirmed that subjective age isn’t
just a feeling, but also a pretty accurate predictor of health. “People who feel younger live
longer. Those who feel older have a shorter lifespan,” he says. So you can get a rough idea of
your longevity by figuring out your subjective age. The trouble is that it’s not as simple as
asking people how old they feel, says Maria Mitina, a biologist at Hong Kong-based biotech
company Deep Longevity who is working on the problem. Subjective age can fluctuate widely
depending on mood and circumstances, so people’s answers may not reflect how old they feel
most of the time.
Each of us has a “baseline” that we consistently return to and which may or may not match up
with our age in years or our position on the psychological timeline, says Mitina. In this respect,
subjective age is like another important quality-of-life measurement, happiness. People’s self-
reported happiness levels vary greatly from day to day and even hour to hour, but an
individual’s happiness tends to swing around a characteristic baseline. Somebody who is
temperamentally cheerful can have bad days, but will always gravitate back towards this happy
medium. Because of short-term fluctuations in subjective age, simply asking someone “How
old do you feel?” isn’t a particularly reliable guide to their baseline subjective age. “It is not a
constant variable: maybe today you feel happier and younger, but in two weeks, you are
unhappy and your subjective age will change,” says Mitina.

How to sort a baseline subjective age from all the fluctuations? Alex Zhavoronkov, founder of
Deep Longevity and a researcher at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California,
wondered if artificial intelligence could help. He had already used AI to discover new markers
of biological aging. According to Zhavoronkov, such biological clocks are one of the most
important recent advances in aging research. However, up to now the psychological side has
been overlooked.

The chief benefit of using AI is that it can spot patterns in large data sets that aren’t discernible
to humans, allowing it to link subjective age to factors that appear to have little to do with it.
The data set Zhavoronkov, Mitina and their colleagues chose came from a project called
MIDUS (Midlife in the United States). This is an ongoing research which was initially started as
a research programme spanning 20 years ago now run by the US National Institute on Aging,
which originally was designed to understand how behavioral, psychological and social factors
influence health and well-being with age. The hope was that AI would allow the team to
develop a psychological aging clock like the biological one. For MIDUS, thousands of people in
the US aged 25 to 75 have been interviewed, with the same 7100 individuals – dropouts and
deaths aside – taking part in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. An extra 3500 volunteers were
added in the mid 2010s. Each time, volunteers were asked more than 1000 questions about all
aspects of their lives, including their physical and mental health, well-being, personality,
beliefs, social lives and sex lives. Some questions, such as “How old do you feel most of the
time?” and “If you could be any age, what would it be?”, are directly aimed at measuring
subjective age. Others quizzed them on less obviously age-related aspects of their physical
and mental health, beliefs, personality and lifestyle choices.
Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2:
In boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet, write:

YES if the statement agrees with the information

NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

14. The subjective suggestive age is affected by the real age.

15. Scientists have not determined what controls the subjective age.
16. A person's longevity is evident from the number of years he has lived.
17. Aging happens both physically and psychologically.
18. Some people feel younger as they get older.
19. Ill health is the reason why people feel older.

Questions 20-23
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.

20. . People’s level of happiness

21. Asking people how old they feel
22. Current aging research
23. The use of AI in age research

A. can evoke different responses at different times

B. is a guaranteed method to determine the subjective age baseline
C. varies according to emotional and situational factors
D. has a medium level around which it can fluctuate
E. enables the connection of the subjective age with other unlikely factors
F. has left the psychological factor out of consideration.
G. usually corresponds with people’s state of age and psychology.

Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in the boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

The original aim of the MIDUS project was to find out the correlation between personal well-being and
the various factors ranging from psychological, behavioral to social elements, in relation to 24.
…... .Thousands of US citizens, whose age was between 25 to 75, participated in the program and the
number of existing participants were relatively maintained from 1990s to 2010s, and another 3500
volunteers were added in the 2010s. The method of the program was to subject the volunteers to
personal 25. ……., which cover a wide range of 26. ….. that are related to their life.