Pre Uni College Digital
OPPORTUNITY CLASS TRIAL TEST – English
Day 5 School Holiday Year 4
Name:____________________________
Date:_
INSTRUCTIONS
1 You have 30 minutes to complete the test. It contains 25 questions.
2 With each question there are four possible answers A, B, C or D. For each question You are to choose the ONE answer you think is best. To show your answer, fill the oval for one letter (A, B, C or D).
3 If you decide to change an answer, rub it out completely and mark your new answer clearly.
4 If you want to work anything out you may write on the question booklet.
5 If you need the help of the supervisor during the test, raise your hand.
Read the passage and answer the questions.
If you’re like many people these days, glancing over your work emails may be the first thing you do after opening your eyes in the morning. In fact, your work is probably in your pocket, travels with you on holiday, sits with you during a romantic dinner, and accompanies you to the playground with your kids.
Even if emails aren’t really your thing and you work in construction, nursing or some other non-office-based industry, the move to a 24/7 economy might mean you have expectations placed on you to work at short notice or during antisocial hours.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, another major trend is that more people work from their homes, which now contain persistent reminders of work that lure them to finish this short email or that little task just before going to bed. And far from us slacking when remote-working, research conducted during this period showed that, on average, people work more hours when at home than at the office.
Despite this, and the widely shared feeling that the work never ends, most people do not want to go back to the more rigid pre-pandemic situation where bosses expected their team to be at the office or on duty strictly between 9 to 5. The increased freedom and flexibility of working arrangements helps many people to juggle their different roles in life. Who doesn’t appreciate the possibility to work from home while waiting for a handyman, or being able to drop off the kids at the sports club at the end of the afternoon?
But many of us also recognise the challenge to set boundaries between life domains and the different roles we must play. When you can easily do the dishes or the laundry while listening to a work meeting, then what is work and what is private can easily mingle and sometimes become inseparable. Books such as The Burnout Society (2010) by Byung-Chul Han and The Flexibility Paradox (2022) by Heejung Chung reflect exactly this feeling of ever-increasing levels of freedom at work that paradoxically provoke our sense of having ever-more responsibilities and a sense that work is endless: always on, never done.
In this new reality, a lot of the advice you will hear is to erect strong barriers between your work and your private domains – no matter how unrealistic that might be – or to somehow find the right balance between these different areas of your life. We propose a very different approach that we believe is more realistic and beneficial.
Aim for harmony rather than balance
We argue that setting up your life in a way that meets your psychological needs (known as needs-based crafting), and doing this across all domains, is what’s important. Psychological needs (we’ll come to what these are shortly) lie at the base of human wellbeing and fulfilment. Needs satisfaction has been linked to successfully fulfilling various life roles, such as parenting, and it may also free new resources to engage in prosocial behaviours, such as helping others, potentially leading to ‘virtuous cycles’. Other studies have shown that people whose needs are fulfilled are more productive and creative at work, more eager to walk the extra mile for their company and help co-workers.
The good news is that neither work nor leisure time must satisfy all your psychological needs. Instead, each role in life you have (eg, experienced foreman, loving husband, caring son, dedicated Red Cross volunteer and avid chess player) plays an important part in an orchestra. Coordination of these different roles, and satisfaction of needs via active engagement in these roles, results in what we call ‘life domain harmony’ – the symphony of your life.
We prefer to talk about life domain harmony rather than ‘work/life balance’ because the latter term suggests that there are only two domains in life that are in opposition, and that ‘work’ is somehow different from ‘life’. Talk of balance also suggests that an equilibrium between the two life domains is optimal. However, in reality, many people have a natural tendency to focus on certain roles, or they shift their focus depending on their life stage (eg, people in their early 20s might focus on their work role, while young parents may put an emphasis on their caring role).
Based on our research and experience, we propose that, as long as your psychological needs are satisfied to a certain degree in any of the roles you have, you are fine. For instance, if you have a rather boring job that provides few opportunities to feel competent and have mastery experiences, you may be able to compensate and satisfy your need for mastery by engaging in a challenging hobby (eg, learning a new language, playing an instrument, or organising a big event for your sports club). Similarly, if your personal life is lacking in social connections, you might be able to satisfy that need via a job that offers you possibilities to truly connect with colleagues and clients. The important point is that it doesn’t matter how much each domain of your life contributes to your needs, as long as your needs are somehow met by one or more of all the different roles you play in life.
In addition to your different roles complementing each other, there may also be positive spillover between roles: experiences in one role enrich experiences in another role, which further supports taking a holistic view of your life. For instance, research showed that employees who felt well-rested after the weekend performed better and
were more willing and able to invest energy in helping others at work the following week. Similarly, our field experiment on vacationing demonstrated that people produced more diverse ideas after a holiday, compared with before it. Experiences at work can also enrich experiences during leisure. For instance, research showed that when employees helped co-workers and felt appreciated for their assistance, they experienced more positive emotions in the evening after work. So, feelings of social connection at work can spill over to and benefit other life domains.
In our view, striving to satisfy your psychological needs across different life domains can be a tool to achieve life domain harmony and ultimately high levels of wellbeing, happiness, productivity and creativity. Remember, some needs may be more easily satisfied at work, while others are satisfied more in the leisure or family context. This view on life and needs can be liberating as none of your roles must satisfy all your needs, and your roles do not compete with each other. Each role simply adds a few notes to your life’s symphony.
Satisfying your basic psychological needs is essential for your mental health. Within psychology, there have been discussions of what exactly constitutes a need, and there are various models describing what these needs are. We find the DRAMMA model, proposed by the psychologist Ed Diener and his colleagues, particularly helpful. This model arose from a meta-analysis that integrated insights from more than 300 scientific papers across various academic disciplines (such as psychology and leisure sciences). DRAMMA is an acronym, and each letter stands for one of six fundamental psychological needs, as follows:
● Detachment is your need for psychological disengagement from effortful tasks, such as certain work-related activities or care-taking responsibilities. To experience detachment, you must not only stop the demanding activity itself, but also stop thinking about it, taking a mental distance. Switching off from these thoughts is important to be fully present in the moment and for regaining the psychobiological resources needed to tend to other life roles. Psychological detachment forms the basis for other experiences to occur. So, you first need to disengage before you can fully engage in something else, such as relaxing.
● Relaxation is your need for periods of low activation of the body and the mind, and it is fostered by activities that demand little physical or intellectual effort and that place few social demands on you. Watching your favourite series on television, having a massage, listening to music or ASMR streams, visiting a sauna or taking a bath are typical examples of activities to relax.
● Autonomy is your need to experience a sense of ownership of your behaviour, to feel in control of your own choices and actions. Autonomy is a basic human need, deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and it shows from a very early age.
● Mastery describes your need for seeking learning opportunities and optimal challenges to experience feelings of achievement and competence. Although activities to feel mastery require effort, they also help to create new resources, such as skills and knowledge, and increase positive mood.
● Meaning is your need to engage in activities that provide you with opportunities to gain something valuable and important in life. A study from the Mayo Clinic found that physicians who were able to spend at least 20 per cent of their time doing work they found meaningful, such as taking time to discuss a diagnosis or prognosis with patients and their families, were at dramatically lower risk for burnout. Anything beyond that 20 per cent had only a marginal impact. In other words: you do not need to change everything about your job to see substantial benefits.
● Affiliation is your basic need to care for others and feel cared for. Social activities, cherishing existing meaningful relationships with family, friends and colleagues, and building new relationships, all help to create positive emotions and enhance wellbeing.
Reflect on how well you are currently addressing your needs.
Reading about the DRAMMA needs and their potential benefits has hopefully sparked your interest in learning more about how to enhance your own needs satisfaction. Now it is time to put theory into practice. A first step is to gain a clear picture of the current state of your needs fulfilment. As you do so, please remember that people naturally vary in the needs that they think are important to them. So, like many other people, you might have developed a tendency to focus only on one or a few needs.
As a starting point, this short test hosted by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands can help you to assess your current DRAMMA needs satisfaction – it does so by asking you questions about the past month, including the degree to which you felt like you could determine for yourself how you spent your time or whether you did anything to broaden your horizons, and giving you a score out of 5 for each of the basic needs.
After you have received your personal score and learned which need(s) you scored the lowest and highest on, it is helpful to reflect on how you spend your days. Routines and habits can make your daily life easier, but sometimes you can unwittingly acquire habits that do not serve your needs, your health and your wellbeing.
1. As per the passage, our work these days is practically
a. Omnipresent
b. Close to zero
c. Huge in number
d. Quantifiable
2. What kind of an economy are we moving into?
a. Perennial
b. Slow paced
c. Fast paced
d. Partial
3. The pandemic has made the working life of people much more
a. Exorbitant
b. Tiring
c. Draining
d. Enjoyable
4. What is a deterrent we face with flexibility in work?
a. None
b. Non existent rigidity
c. Setting peripheries
d. Ease of work
5. What is the overall tone of the passage?
a. Informative
b. Exploratory
c. Ignorant
d. Happening
6. What is another word for “harmony”?
a. Musical notes
b. Harmonium
c. Consensus
d. Agreement
Read the poem and answer the questions.
But is there a way out? Imagine in insomnia the forests that grow at such hours in other regions, the trains that cross them to reach a destination in the future of others.
Is there a way our? Imagine night filled with violent cities, the rumbling of engines in the subways and rain falling on the black plastic of strawberry fields, all the suffering and uncertainty of the world.
And in the morning, look, it's a beautiful day Your friends are getting up in the other room, they're heading down to the kitchen to make coffee.
But is there a way out?
7. With what poetic device does the poem start?
a. Simile
b. Metaphor
c. Rhetorical question
d. Hypophora
8. What place is the poet referring to?
a. Village
b. Forests
c. Cities
d. Countries
9. The poet talks about the ______ of the life he is discussing about
a. Obverse
b. Opposite
c. Same
d. Many
10. What is the overall tone of the poem?
a. Cheerful
b. Worrisome
c. Gloomy
d. Aggressive
11. What feeling is most strongly conveyed by the repeated question, "But is there a way out?"?
a. Joy
b. Confusion
c. Hope
d. Despair
Read the text below then answer the questions. Six sentences have been removed from the text. Choose from the sentences (A – G) the one which fits each gap (12 – 17). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.
1. A cry for help is hard to resist. This exchange comes from conversations between the AI engineer Blake Lemoine and an AI system called LaMDA (‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’).(12…..). Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not –sentient?
2. The question is vast and daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. But it may be comforting to learn that a group of scientists has been wrestling with a very similar question for a long time.(13…..). It’s not that we have a single, decisive test that conclusively settles the issue, but rather that animals display many different markers of sentience. Markers are behavioural and physiological properties we can observe in scientific settings, and often in our everyday life as well. Their presence in animals can justify our seeing them as having sentient minds. Just as we often diagnose a disease by looking for lots of symptoms, all of which raise the probability of having that disease, so we can look for sentience by investigating many different markers.
3. This marker-based approach has been most intensively developed in the case of pain. Pain, though only a small part of sentience, has a special ethical significance. It matters a lot. For example, scientists need to show they have
taken pain into account, and minimised it as far as possible, to get funding for animal research. (14…..). In recent years, the debate has concentrated on invertebrate animals like octopuses, crabs and lobsters that have traditionally been left outside the scope of animal welfare laws. The brains of invertebrates are organised very differently from our own, so behavioural markers end up carrying a lot of weight.
4. One of the least controversial pain markers is ‘wound tending’ – when an animal nurses and protects an injury until it heals. (15…..). A third is ‘conditioned place preference’, where an animal becomes strongly averse to a place where it experienced the effects of a noxious stimulus, and strongly favours a place where it could experience the effects of a pain-relieving drug. These markers are based on what the experience of pain does for us. Pain is that terrible feeling that leads us to nurse our wounds, change our priorities, become averse to things, and value pain relief. When we see the same pattern of responses in an animal, it raises the probability that the animal is experiencing pain too. (16…..). Octopuses, crabs and lobsters are now recognised as sentient under UK law, a move that animal welfare organisations hope to see followed around the world.
5. Could we use evidence of the same general type to look for sentience in AI? Suppose we were able to create a robot rat that behaves just like a real rat, passing all the same cognitive and behavioural tests. Would we be able to use the markers of rat sentience to conclude that the robot rat is sentient, too?
Unfortunately, it can’t be that simple. (17…..). To ‘emulate’, in computing, is to reproduce all the functionality of one system within another system. For example, there is software that emulates a Nintendo GameBoy within a Windows PC. In 2014, researchers tried to emulate the whole brain of a nematode worm, and put the emulation in control of a Lego robot.
a. They are ‘comparative psychologists’: scientists of animal minds. We have lots of evidence that many other animals are sentient beings.
b. Last year, Lemoine leaked the transcript because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection
c. This type of evidence has shifted opinions about invertebrate animals that have sometimes been dismissed as incapable of suffering.
d. So the question of what types of behaviour may indicate pain has been discussed a great deal.
e. Another is ‘motivational trade-off’ behaviour, where an animal will change its priorities, abandoning resources it previously found valuable in order to avoid a noxious stimulus – but only when the stimulus becomes severe enough.
f. Perhaps it could work for one specific type of artificial agent: a neuron-by-neuron emulation of an animal brain.
Read the four extracts below. For questions 18 – 25, choose the option (A, B, C or D) which you think best answers the question. Which extract…
Shows that the author used to write journals with a futuristic perspective 18
Tells about the author’s journey in journaling 19
Informs the reader that the author was a visionary since their youth 20
Highlights the beauty of expression and literature 21
Is a clear set of instructions that author gives to readers 22
Describes beautifully, other writers’ journaling 23
Tells that writing doesn't have to be a rigid practice for everyone 24
Shows how literature can help depict human emotions 25
EXTRACT A
When researching other people’s lives, authors often visit archives to dig into the ephemera that made that person who they were. But when exploring our own lives, we seem to forget that we have our own personal archives, including old journals, email, text threads and voice memos. Lately, I’ve been dipping into my personal archives –specifically, my old journals – to reacquaint myself with the person I was 20 years ago, doing remote fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic for eight weeks each summer. I’m writing a book, you see, about my experiences as a field scientist, and though my memories of that time seem strong, I’m still surprised by some of what appears in my journals. For example, I didn’t remember arriving in the field as early as I did one year, or the level of frustration I had when some of my equipment didn’t work. My journals bring these events back to me, in full colour and precise detail, allowing me to add lyrical descriptions and scenes to my book. Research shows that keeping a journal is a way to be more mindful, to really think about what you’re experiencing and how it affects you and others. More specifically, journaling can also improve your communication skills and sharpen your memory. Studies suggest that if, when ill, you write about stressful events and reflect on them (reflection is key), you can improve your health outcomes. Writing in a journal is also a way to get better sleep and boost your self-confidence.
EXTRACT B
For some reason, I’m often reluctant to dig into my personal archive. The themes are often repetitive: the joys of pond hockey, the importance of being myself, the admonition to exercise more or to make a schedule and stick to it. But in between are gems: short stories begun but not finished. Essay fragments replete with stunning detail and vivid characters, waiting to be brought to life. Insights into life that I forgot I ever had, that help me with my current life situations in ways I never thought possible. For example, my journals warned me regularly against becoming a science professor, but I ignored them and ended up falling out of academia due to illness.
What if I had heeded my own advice? Though they weren’t originally intended to be read by others, some writers’ journals have been published posthumously for public consumption, including those of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka and others. Readers snap up these books eagerly, hoping to find insights into the writing life, a sort of how-to manual for becoming a good writer. Though, as Didion wrote, ‘your notebook will never help me, nor mine you’. In many cases, however, published diaries show an obvious through-line of how the author became the writer we know. For example, Woolf started journaling at the age of 14, and wrote 38 notebooks from 1897 to 1941. Her journals are considered not just a window inside her mind, but also ‘a remarkable social document’. They feed directly into Woolf’s writing; in 1919, she herself said that ‘the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.’
EXTRACT C
Plath’s diaries cover the 13 years before she died, and are filled with musings on writing and the details of her everyday life. One Goodreads reviewer said they have to take a break from reading them because Plath’s ‘feelings were so vivid you feel like an intruder’. Kafka kept a diary from 1910 to 1923, ending just a year before his death. There is a Twitter account called @Franz_K_Diaries that Tweets daily excerpts from his journals, giving readers insight into the depressed and ill writer’s life. Some of his entries are remarkably short, reading: ‘July 1, 1914: “Too tired.”… September 22, 1917: “Nothing.”’ Other writers have published their journals as part of their oeuvre, like May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude (1973) and Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020). In these cases, the author has the ability to edit out details they don’t want to share with readers, something Leonard Woolf took offence to in his foreword to his wife’s journals. He argued that taking out specific details could unbalance the document: ‘The omissions almost always distort or conceal the true character of the diarist or letter-writer …’ Sarton writes about gardening, the weather, writing, and living alone, all of which documents the evolution of her art and spirituality. An example of her insights relates to small talk, which she can’t abide, as ‘Time wasted is poison.’ McAnulty, on the other hand, writes about the natural world and his relation to it, as well as his autism and how it sets him apart from others. His book in particular focuses on ideas and big events – the mundane, everyday aspects of life are much less prominent than they are in diaries published posthumously.
EXTRACT D
So how do you start writing a diary? First, consider your goal in doing so. Do you want to compile daily events, or do you want to analyse those events through a personal lens? Do you want to practise writing, or do you want to clear your mind before you sit down to write something more polished? Do you want to publish your journal, or is it solely for your own consumption? Do you want something that you can return to and remember your thoughts about specific events? Figuring out what you want out of your journal is a critical first step in driving the rest of your journal
decisions. Think about the length of time you can allot to journaling, and at what time of day. Can you fit in 15 minutes, or do you have an entire hour free? Does morning or evening work best, both with your schedule and your mindset? Do you have to get up early and journal for half an hour before the house comes to life around you? Or do you need to go to a busy coffee shop and write for an hour? Some writers advise that you write at the same time and place every day; for example, Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way (1992), suggests writing ‘morning pages’, which are three pages done every morning as soon as you get up. But we all have our own schedules and can’t always find the ‘ideal’ time to journal – we just have to pick a time that works, and stick with it. Alternatively, you may find that you can only snatch small moments during the day to journal, moments that change as your schedule changes. But every little bit counts.