Verbal ability: the four question types

1. 1Within a generation, the same streets were lined with cafés and design studios.
2. 2The old mills closed one by one in the 1980s, leaving whole districts empty.
3. 3Rents rose so fast that many of the artists who had started the revival were priced out.
4. 4Artists moved in first, drawn by the large, cheap spaces.

1. 1Participants given a dull task first came up with more original ideas afterwards.
2. 2Yet most of us now reach for a phone the moment a queue or a commute turns dull.
3. 3Recent studies suggest that mild boredom can make people more creative.
4. 4The trick, then, is not to avoid boredom but to stop filling it instantly.

1. 1Scientists point to two main reasons for this “urban heat island”.
2. 2The second is that cities have fewer trees, which cool the air by releasing water through their leaves.
3. 3Cities are often several degrees warmer than the countryside around them.
4. 4Planting trees and using lighter roofing materials can therefore cut city temperatures noticeably.
5. 5The first is that asphalt and concrete absorb sunlight during the day and release it slowly at night.

1. 1The practice spread to other ports, and the wait was later extended to forty days.
2. 2Today the word can mean anything from two weeks at home to a few hours at an airport.
3. 3In 1377 the port of Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, began holding arriving ships offshore for thirty days before their crews could land.
4. 4That longer wait gave us the word “quarantine”, from the Italian for “forty days”.

1. 1During deep sleep, the brain clears out waste products that build up while we are awake.
2. 2Many people use their phones in bed, and the light from the screen can delay sleep.
3. 3It also replays and strengthens the memories formed during the day.
4. 4These two functions help explain why a sleepless night leaves us both foggy and forgetful.
5. 5Sleep is far from a passive state.

1. 1Each GPS satellite carries an atomic clock and broadcasts the exact time at which it sends its signal.
2. 2A receiver on the ground compares those times with its own clock to work out how far away each satellite is.
3. 3Distances to four or more satellites are enough to fix the receiver’s position.
4. 4Smartphone makers advertise better cameras more often than better location accuracy.
5. 5Because the signals travel at the speed of light, a timing error of a millionth of a second shifts the position by about 300 metres.

1. 1Tea reached Britain in the seventeenth century as an expensive import from China.
2. 2High taxes made it so valuable that smuggling became a large business.
3. 3When the tax was slashed in 1784, legal tea became cheap and smuggling collapsed almost overnight.
4. 4Green tea contains less caffeine than coffee.
5. 5Within a few decades, tea had changed from a luxury into an everyday drink for most households.

Studies of remote work disagree about productivity, and the disagreement may be less about working from home than about what is measured. Tasks that need long stretches of concentration, such as writing code or reports, often go faster away from office interruptions. Tasks that depend on quick, informal exchanges, such as training new staff or solving unfamiliar problems together, tend to suffer. A firm’s verdict on remote work therefore says as much about its mix of tasks as about the arrangement itself.

1. (a)Remote work makes employees more productive than office work.
2. (b)Whether remote work helps productivity depends largely on the kind of work being done.
3. (c)Studies of remote work are unreliable because they measure the wrong things.
4. (d)Firms should keep training and problem-solving in the office and send other work home.

An animal or plant introduced to a new region is not automatically a threat. Most introduced species fail to establish themselves, and many that survive cause little harm. A small minority, however, spread rapidly because they have left behind the predators and diseases that kept them in check at home, and these can devastate local ecosystems. Since it is hard to predict which newcomers will behave this way, preventing introductions is far cheaper than removing a species once it has spread.

1. (a)Most introduced species are harmless, but because the few that turn invasive are hard to predict and costly to remove, prevention is the better policy.
2. (b)Introduced species usually destroy the ecosystems they enter.
3. (c)Predators and diseases are the main cause of extinction.
4. (d)Governments should remove every introduced species as soon as it is detected.

When museums drop their entry fees, visitor numbers usually rise sharply. Yet surveys often find that the new visitors resemble the old ones: the same well-educated, middle-class groups simply visit more often. Price, it seems, was a smaller barrier than habit, a sense of not belonging, or not knowing what a museum offers. Free entry may be worth having for other reasons, but on its own it does little to widen who visits.

1. (a)Free entry is the best way to attract new kinds of visitors to museums.
2. (b)Museums should keep charging fees because free entry does not work.
3. (c)Free entry raises visitor numbers but mostly brings back existing visitors, because cost was not the main barrier for others.
4. (d)Middle-class visitors are the only people interested in museums.

Where does this sentence fit best? “It is also acidic, which most bacteria cannot tolerate.”

Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that were still edible. (1) Honey resists spoilage for several reasons. (2) Its sugar content is so high that it pulls water out of any microbe that lands in it. (3) Bees also add an enzyme that produces small amounts of hydrogen peroxide. (4) Together, these make honey one of the few foods that can last for centuries.

Where does this sentence fit best? “Using movable metal type, a small workshop could now turn out hundreds of copies in the time a scribe needed for one.”

Before the printing press, books in Europe were copied by hand, and a single volume could take months to produce. (1) Gutenberg’s press, developed around 1450, changed that. (2) Within fifty years, millions of books had been printed across the continent. (3) Cheaper books meant that ideas could spread faster than the authorities could control them. (4)

Which sentence best completes the paragraph?

Many people assume that the best way to learn a skill is to practise it in long, focused blocks. Studies of “interleaved” practice suggest otherwise. When learners mix different kinds of problems in one session, they feel slower and make more mistakes. Yet when they are tested days later, they usually outperform those who practised one problem type at a time. ______

1. (a)Mixing problems is therefore pointless for most learners.
2. (b)The struggle that makes mixed practice feel worse appears to be part of what makes the learning last.
3. (c)Long blocks of focused practice remain the best method for beginners.
4. (d)Tests taken days later are less reliable than tests taken immediately.