VSTEP Mock Test #3 - READING

In recent years, a growing number of young people around the world have begun to question how much they own. Instead of buying new things regularly, many of them are choosing to live with fewer possessions. This way of living is called minimalism, and it is becoming increasingly popular among teenagers and young adults in many countries.

The reasons behind this shift are varied. Some young people say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they have accumulated. Others are motivated by financial concerns, since owning fewer things often means spending less money. A number of young people also point to environmental reasons, as producing and disposing of goods creates significant waste. For many, minimalism has become a practical response to the pressures of modern life.

One of the clearest benefits that researchers have identified is reduced stress. Scientists at UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families found that living in a cluttered environment is directly linked to higher levels of cortisol, which is the body's primary stress hormone. When young people clear unnecessary items from their living spaces, many of them report feeling calmer and more focused. With fewer objects competing for their attention, it also becomes easier to concentrate on studies or work.

Sleep quality is another area where minimalism appears to make a meaningful difference. A study published in the journal Sleep by Oxford Academic examined over 1,000 participants and found that decluttering the bedroom was associated with falling asleep more quickly and experiencing fewer disturbances during the night. Researchers suggested that a tidy sleeping environment reduces the mental reminder of unfinished tasks, allowing the brain to relax more fully before sleep.

The connection between owning less and feeling better has also been confirmed in research focused specifically on young adults. A 2024 study published by Springer Nature in the journal Environment, Development and Sustainability examined 452 members of Generation Z and found that minimalist consumption habits were strongly associated with greater life satisfaction, increased happiness, and improved overall well-being.

Not everyone finds minimalism easy to adopt. Some young people feel social pressure to own the latest gadgets or follow new fashion trends. Others find it emotionally difficult to let go of objects connected to memories or past experiences. However, those who have made the change often say that the sense of freedom they gain is worth the effort involved.

Minimalism does not mean living without comfort or pleasure. It simply means being more thoughtful about what one chooses to keep. For a growing number of young people today, having less has become a way of making room for what truly matters in life.

A. Autumn is the season when new students arrive on university campuses across the country. They are eager to begin what many say will be the best and most important years of their lives. Among them, a growing group has a special background: they are the first in their families to study at a university. Known as "first-generation students," these young people carry their own personal ambitions. However, they also carry the high expectations of parents and families who have no experience with higher education.

B. "Most first-generation students I meet believe that getting accepted into university was the hardest part," said Dr. Miriam Ellsworth, a university counsellor who has worked with students for over fifteen years. "They assume that once they are admitted, the path forward is simple. What they don't expect is how completely unprepared they feel when they actually arrive." Dr. Ellsworth's observation highlights a common pattern: the challenge of passing the entrance exam is often smaller than the social and academic challenges that follow.

C. The first of these challenges is often "academic culture shock." Many first-generation students do not have family members to explain what a university discussion looks like, how to talk to a professor, or why essay formats matter. Research from the Higher Education Access Institute in 2019 found that 68% of first-generation students felt "significantly underprepared" for university studies in their first semester. In contrast, only 27% of students whose parents had attended university felt this way.

D. Dr. Ellsworth noted that many first-generation students feel like they do not belong. They are in an environment where other students seem to know rules that were never explained to them. Sometimes they get so stressed that they stop attending classes, miss deadlines, and quietly disappear before anyone notices they are having trouble. This is difficult to notice because these students are less likely to ask for help. They fear that asking questions will prove what they already suspect: that they are not smart enough to be there.

E. On the other hand, some students try to cope by pushing themselves too hard. They work longer hours, sleep less, and join too many activities to look as capable as their classmates. "When a student is studying out of fear rather than confidence, the quality of their work drops, even if they spend more time on it," Dr. Ellsworth observed. This leads to extreme tiredness that teachers might not notice, because the student appears to be doing fine.

F. Every year, hundreds of thousands of first-generation students face these hidden challenges without a guide. What makes their situation even more difficult is money. Unlike classmates from university-educated families, first-generation students usually do not have family savings to rely on when unexpected costs appear.

G. The financial pressures are compounded by a second, less visible shock: the "cost of belonging." For example, a student might find out that joining the university's social life - like networking events, study dinners, or even printing documents - costs hundreds of dollars extra each semester. For students on strict budgets, these extra costs act as silent barriers to the university experiences that should be equal for everyone.

H. Furthermore, universities usually expect students to know what researchers call "hidden curricula" - the unwritten knowledge of how the university works, what is expected outside the classroom, and how to communicate effectively with teachers. According to a 2021 national survey in the Journal of First-Generation Student Research, over 31,000 first-generation students were studied for four years. The results showed that fewer than 52% finished their degree in the normal four-year period, compared with over 71% of students whose parents went to university.

I. Those who take longer than four years to finish their degrees face more problems. They start working later, get into more debt, and often lose their scholarships. In addition, it is emotionally difficult to explain to their families - who made sacrifices for their education - why it is taking so long. A first-generation student dealing with all these pressures is clearly navigating a much harder journey than the university brochure ever suggested.

On a stretch of canal in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, a fishing boat sits motionless at the bank. Its owner, a man in his sixties, stares at a surface he can no longer reach: the water has disappeared entirely beneath a dense, unbroken mat of water hyacinth. The flowering plant, native to South America, arrived in the region more than a century ago, introduced originally for its ornamental purple blooms, and has never left. Beneath the mat, dissolved oxygen levels fall to the point where fish cannot survive. Nets come up empty. Boats cannot pass. The plant has not been invited, and it cannot be reasoned with.

This scene, repeated across lakes, rivers, and wetlands from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, reflects a crisis that ecologists have been tracking for decades. According to the 2023 Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, more than 37,000 alien species have been introduced to ecosystems around the world through human activity. Of these, over 3,500 have become invasive - establishing themselves so aggressively that they displace native species, disrupt food chains, and alter the physical conditions of the environments they occupy. The annual economic cost of biological invasions now exceeds 423 billion US dollars, a figure that has quadrupled every decade since 1970. More troubling still, invasive species have contributed to at least 60 percent of recorded global plant and animal extinctions. [A]

How do species travel so far from their origins? The answer lies in the machinery of modern globalisation. Cargo ships carry alien organisms in their ballast water across entire oceans. Travellers unknowingly transport seeds, insects, and soil microbes on their clothing and luggage. The ornamental plant trade, the very channel through which water hyacinth first spread across Asia, introduces thousands of species into new regions each year with minimal biosecurity screening. Once a species gains a foothold in a new environment, its expansion is often exponential: with no natural predators to limit its numbers, and with conditions frequently more favourable than in its native range, an invasive species can overrun native competitors within a single growing season. This dynamic is further compounded by climate change, which is steadily expanding the habitable zones of many invasive species into regions that were previously too cold or too dry to support them. [B]

Scientists broadly agree that early intervention is the most effective response - removing an invasive species before it becomes established costs a fraction of what managing it demands once it has spread. Yet coordinated action has proven elusive. Only about one sixth of the world's nations currently have comprehensive national strategies for managing invasive species, according to the IPBES assessment. [C] The debate over how to intervene adds further complication. Aggressive eradication programmes, using herbicides, biological controls, or physical removal, have proven effective in contained environments but face resistance from communities worried about the unintended consequences of chemical treatments on native biodiversity. Some ecologists argue that ecosystems, given sufficient time, may develop a new equilibrium around non-native arrivals. Critics of this view counter that by the time such equilibrium emerges, the ecological and economic damage will already be irreversible. [D]

The water hyacinth on the Mekong canal will not remove itself. Nor will the dozens of other invasive species currently reshaping wetlands, forests, and coastal zones across the region. The science is clear; what remains absent is the political will to act on it before the window for affordable intervention closes permanently.

A. The interfaces of modern digital platforms are rarely as neutral as they appear. Behind the screens of social media networks, streaming services, and online retailers lies a set of design principles collectively known as persuasive design - an approach that draws deliberately on findings from behavioural psychology and economics to guide users toward specific actions. While the term may suggest gentle encouragement, critics argue that the techniques involved frequently cross into something more troubling. The central concern is not simply that platforms attempt to influence user behaviour, which arguably all designed environments do to some degree, but that they do so in ways that are largely invisible to the people being influenced, and that prioritise platform revenue over user wellbeing. This paradigm shift, moving from simple functionality to behavior modification, has pushed the digital landscape to a precipice where the boundary between user-centric design and psychological manipulation becomes increasingly tenuous.

B. At the heart of persuasive design is the exploitation of automatic, fast-acting mental processes. Psychologists have long distinguished between two broad modes of cognition: a slower, more deliberate form of reasoning, and a faster, instinctive mode that governs the majority of everyday decisions. Persuasive design consistently targets the latter. The infinite scroll feature, now standard across most major platforms, illustrates this clearly. By eliminating the natural pause that arises when a user reaches the end of a page, designers remove a moment of reflection that might otherwise prompt disengagement. The effect is reinforced by the irregular timing of notifications, a new message, a comment, an incoming like, which research in behavioural science associates with heightened anticipation. Because the reward arrives unpredictably rather than at fixed intervals, users are more likely to check repeatedly, a pattern that mirrors the mechanics of chance-based gambling.

C. A more deliberate form of influence operates through what the design industry itself has termed dark patterns - interface elements constructed specifically to obscure or restrict user choice. These are interface elements intentionally crafted to deceive or coerce the user. Examples include cancellation options buried within multi-step menus, pre-selected subscription boxes that require active effort to untick, and urgency indicators suggesting limited availability when none exists. Proponents of such techniques maintain that they represent legitimate responses to competitive market pressures. However, a growing body of research suggests that their effectiveness depends precisely on their ability to bypass considered decision-making. A 2022 review by the Norwegian Consumer Council examined over 200 popular applications and found that the majority employed at least one such technique, with the most common being manufactured scarcity and default settings weighted toward the platform's commercial interests.

D. What complicates this picture further is the role of algorithmic personalisation. Users generally experience their online environments as responsive to their own preferences, a reasonable assumption, given that recommendation systems do incorporate past behaviour. What is less visible, however, is the extent to which those systems actively shape the preferences they appear merely to reflect. Platforms collect detailed behavioural data, which content a user pauses on, which links they follow, how long they remain on a given page, and use this information to construct feeds calibrated for maximum engagement. Over time, this process creates a self-reinforcing dynamic: the more a user engages with a particular type of content, the more prominently that content is displayed, regardless of whether sustained exposure to it serves the user's interests.

E. The question of how to respond to these practices remains genuinely contested. Some researchers advocate for stronger regulatory intervention, arguing that current self-regulatory frameworks have proven inadequate. Others caution that regulation risks stifling innovation or imposing a paternalistic standard on what constitutes acceptable design. What the available evidence does suggest, however, is that informed consent, the principle that individuals should understand and agree to the ways in which their behaviour is being influenced - is difficult to achieve within environments specifically engineered to operate below the threshold of conscious awareness. Whether the primary obligation to address this falls on platform designers, legislators, or users themselves is a question that researchers, regulators, and the technology industry are only beginning to work through.