VSTEP Mock Test #4 - READING

Solo travel is becoming more popular among young people around the world. Four travellers from different countries share their stories about the first time they travelled alone - what they feared before the trip, what surprised them along the way, and what they learned from the experience.

Maria, from Brazil, was 22 when she took her first solo trip to Portugal. Before she left, her biggest fear was getting lost in an unfamiliar city with no one to help her. "I checked the map a hundred times," she said. But once she arrived, she was surprised by how easy it was to ask local people for directions. Strangers were kind and patient, and one elderly woman even walked her to the bus stop. Maria learned that fear of the unknown is often worse than the reality. In fact, most people are willing to help a traveller in need.

Jin-ho, a 25-year-old from South Korea, chose to travel alone to Vietnam for two weeks. He had studied the local food and culture before leaving, but he still worried about the language barrier. To his surprise, he found that smiling and using simple gestures worked better than he expected. He also discovered a small family-run restaurant near his hotel where the owner taught him a few Vietnamese words every morning over breakfast. Jin-ho said that this kind of connection with local people was something he had never experienced when travelling with friends.

Amara, from Nigeria, spent ten days travelling alone through Thailand at the age of 24. Her biggest fear before the trip was safety - she had read many warnings online about pickpockets and scams targeting tourists. However, she was pleasantly surprised to find that most people she met were trustworthy and friendly. She did lose her travel card on the third day, but a hotel receptionist helped her contact her bank and find a solution. Amara returned home feeling much more confident in her ability to handle unexpected problems.

Finally, Lucas, a 27-year-old from Argentina, travelled solo to Japan. Unlike the others, his main concern was not safety or language - it was loneliness. He was used to travelling with a large group of friends and could not imagine spending ten days without anyone to talk to. In Japan, however, he quickly joined a free walking tour and met travellers from many different countries. By the end of the trip, he had exchanged contact details with people from six different nations. Lucas now believes that solo travel is actually one of the best ways to meet new people.

Although each of these four travellers had different fears and different surprises, they all came back with the same feeling: solo travel had changed them in a positive way. They became more independent, more open to new experiences, and more confident when facing challenges alone. For anyone thinking about taking their first solo trip, their message is simple - stop worrying and just go.

Millions of pedestrians walk above echoing, empty chambers every single day without even realizing it. Beneath the busy pavements of the world's most crowded metropolises lies a forgotten network of transit tunnels, bunkers, and platforms. Once essential for the daily commute, many of these subterranean structures slowly fell out of use as transport systems expanded and engineering technology advanced. For decades, they remained locked, dark, and entirely ignored by the populations moving rapidly above them. These underground sites, ranging from old subway stations to repurposed wartime shelters, were essentially left to decay, becoming time capsules of urban development that few people ever had the opportunity to see. [A]

However, a new generation of spatial designers is beginning to take advantage of these hidden depths. Rather than sealing them off permanently with concrete, planners are finding ways to turn what was once considered useless underground wasteland into dynamic public venues. Consider the famous "ghost stations" of the Paris Metro. Instead of leaving them as abandoned relics gathering dust, city officials have begun transforming several of them into underground swimming pools, art galleries, and immersive performance spaces. By retaining the original tiled walls, rusted metal fixtures, and vintage signs, the newly renovated designs maintain a highly distinct atmosphere that honors the past. This innovative approach manages to bring to life what has been hidden away for generations. The fascinating combination of old transit architecture and modern leisure provides residents with a calm, unusual refuge from the chaotic, noisy environment above ground. [B]

Beyond cultural and recreational venues, these subterranean spaces also play a vital role in environmental sustainability. In London, massive deep-level shelters from the mid-twentieth century have been carefully converted into advanced underground farms. Because the climate deep below the surface remains perfectly stable regardless of the season, these environments are remarkably efficient for growing specific crops. Using hydroponic systems, urban farmers can use significantly less water than traditional agriculture, while the constant underground temperature also removes the need for heating or cooling the growing space. These underground farms not only supply fresh produce directly to local city restaurants but also ensure that sustainable food sources are highly accessible to densely packed urban populations. [C]

Naturally, the engineering required to make these deep spaces safe for the public is highly complex, particularly regarding ventilation and the simulation of natural lighting. Yet, the successful results demonstrate that a physical structure's function can evolve dramatically over time without completely losing its historical soul. While some critics might dismiss these underground projects as merely a temporary architectural trend, they actually represent a profound shift in urban preservation. By looking beneath the surface rather than just building higher into the sky, modern cities are discovering that their forgotten foundations can actively foster a sense of community in the present day. [D]

I opened my work calendar one evening last October and stared at it for a long time. Twelve hours of meetings, emails flagged as urgent, and tasks marked overdue. I had been at my desk since seven in the morning. And yet, looking back at the week, I could not point to a single piece of work I was genuinely proud of. I had been busy - relentlessly, visibly, exhaustingly busy - but I had not, by any honest measure, been productive.

That private moment of discomfort reflects a much larger pattern. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reveals a striking paradox: the countries whose workers log the most hours tend to produce the least output per hour. Germany and Denmark, where annual working hours hover around 1,400, consistently outperform Mexico and Greece, where workers exceed 2,000 hours a year, in GDP generated per hour worked. The correlation is both strong and uncomfortable; every additional 100 hours a country works annually lines up with approximately ten dollars less in hourly output. Meanwhile, the 2024 Microsoft Work Trend Index found that 68 percent of employees globally report feeling overwhelmed by the volume and pace of their work, with nearly half teetering on the edge of burnout. We are, it seems, working harder than ever while getting progressively less out of each hour we spend at our desks. [A]

Why does this happen? The answer lies not in individual laziness or poor time management, but in the culture that modern workplaces have cultivated over decades. In many organisations, visible busyness has become a proxy for value. Employees who leave on time are quietly judged as less committed than those who send emails at midnight. Managers reward presence over output, and performance reviews often reflect how hard someone is perceived to work rather than what they actually deliver. Compounding this is the relentless intrusion of digital technology into every hour of the day. Smartphones and messaging platforms have made it structurally impossible for most knowledge workers to fully disengage from their professional obligations, eroding the recovery time that cognitive science consistently identifies as essential to sustained high performance. [B]

The evidence that a different approach can work is no longer speculative. Between 2015 and 2019, Iceland conducted large-scale trials in which approximately 2,500 public sector workers reduced their hours from 40 to 35–36 per week with no reduction in pay. Researchers found that productivity remained stable or improved in the majority of workplaces, while measures of employee wellbeing increased dramatically - stress fell, sick days decreased, and workers reported greater energy and engagement. A similar pilot conducted across dozens of companies in the United Kingdom in 2022 yielded comparable results, with the majority of participating firms choosing to make the shorter week permanent. [C] Yet despite this growing body of evidence, most large corporations have shown little appetite for structural change. Reducing hours threatens a management culture built on the assumption that more time at work equals more value created - an assumption the data has repeatedly failed to support.

The challenge, then, is not a lack of evidence. It is a lack of willingness to act on what the evidence shows. Productivity is not measured in hours spent staring at a screen. It is measured in the quality of what those hours produce. Until organisations are willing to confront that distinction honestly, the illusion of busyness will continue to masquerade as genuine achievement, and workers will keep paying the price. [D]

A. Among the most compelling findings in modern neuroscience is that human memory does not function like a video camera - faithfully recording and replaying events as they happened. Instead, the brain constructs and reconstructs memories dynamically, reshaping them with every act of retrieval. The ancient Greeks believed memory was a wax tablet onto which experience pressed impressions, a metaphor that, while poetic, bears little resemblance to the biological reality. The study of memory has accelerated dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, yet despite decades of research, scientists still disagree about precisely how the brain encodes, stores, and, most controversially, alters what we remember.

B. There are several distinct systems through which the brain processes different kinds of memory. Declarative memory, sometimes called explicit memory, encompasses conscious recollections of facts and events: knowing that Paris is the capital of France, or recalling a childhood birthday party. Non-declarative memory, by contrast, operates largely without conscious awareness and includes skills such as riding a bicycle or the conditioned aversion to a food that once caused illness. Within declarative memory, psychologist Endel Tulving proposed in 1972 a distinction between episodic memory - the mental re-experiencing of specific personal events, and semantic memory, which stores general factual knowledge without its personal context. The broader framework contrasting declarative and non-declarative systems was subsequently developed through the work of neuroscientist Larry Squire and colleagues in the 1980s and 1990s, and together these concepts remain the dominant architecture for understanding memory today.

C. At the cellular level, memory formation depends on a process known as synaptic plasticity, the strengthening or weakening of connections between neurons in response to experience. When neurons fire together repeatedly in response to the same event, the connections between them are reinforced so that they are more likely to activate together in the future. The physical trace of a memory, the specific pattern of neural connections encoding a particular experience, is called an engram, a concept proposed theoretically in the early twentieth century. For decades, the engram remained a theoretical construct, impossible to observe directly. That changed in 2012, when a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa published a landmark study in the journal Nature, demonstrating for the first time that a specific engram could be identified and artificially reactivated using light-based techniques in mice. When the relevant neurons were stimulated, the animals displayed fear behaviour associated with a memory of a previous shock, even in a context where no shock had been given - direct experimental evidence that discrete memories have physical locations within the brain.

D. Yet the existence of the engram does not mean that memory is fixed or permanent. A landmark study published in Nature in 2000 by neuroscientist Karim Nader, then at New York University, provided the first modern experimental evidence for what is now called memory reconsolidation - the observation that when a consolidated memory is retrieved, it briefly returns to a chemically unstable state before being re-stored. Nader demonstrated that blocking protein synthesis in the amygdala of rats immediately after a fear memory was reactivated was sufficient to erase that memory, whereas the same treatment given without prior reactivation left the memory intact. During this window of vulnerability, the memory can be modified, strengthened, or disrupted by new information. Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has spent decades demonstrating how easily false information can be woven into genuine human memories. In a widely replicated study, participants were led to believe they had experienced an event, such as being lost as a young child in a shopping mall, that had never occurred, simply through exposure to suggestive information provided by researchers after the fact.

E. The malleability of memory has far-reaching implications beyond the laboratory. In legal settings, eyewitness testimony has historically been treated as among the most persuasive forms of evidence. Research in memory science, however, has consistently shown that eyewitness accounts are susceptible to distortion from multiple sources: the emotional intensity of the witnessed event, the passage of time, leading questions posed by investigators, and exposure to media coverage of the incident. The National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law, has documented that mistaken eyewitness identification was a contributing factor in a large proportion of wrongful conviction cases, prompting extensive calls for reform in how such testimony is gathered and assessed in courts of law.

F. Not all memory researchers accept that reconsolidation is as destabilising as its strongest advocates suggest. Some scientists argue that the degree to which memories are altered during retrieval has been overstated, and that the brain possesses powerful stabilising mechanisms that resist arbitrary distortion. From this perspective, many apparent cases of memory modification may in fact reflect retrieval failure, an inability to access an original memory trace, rather than any genuine alteration of the stored engram itself. These scientists contend that the original memory may persist intact even when a person reports remembering something differently. The debate between those who see memory as fundamentally dynamic and those who emphasise its stability has yet to be resolved and continues to drive much of the experimental agenda in cognitive neuroscience.

G. A separate but related question concerns whether memories can be deliberately strengthened or selectively suppressed. Techniques derived from cognitive science, such as spaced repetition - the practice of reviewing material at gradually increasing time intervals, have proven highly effective at consolidating long-term declarative memories. Conversely, research by Michael Anderson and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge, first published in Nature in 2001, demonstrated that the active suppression of unwanted memories is a real and neurologically measurable phenomenon. Using what they called the think/no-think task, Anderson's team found that when people repeatedly prevented a specific memory from entering conscious awareness, their later recall of that memory was significantly reduced. Brain imaging studies subsequently showed that this process of suppression involves the prefrontal cortex reducing activity in the hippocampus, a structure central to memory for events. Whether suppression leads to permanent erasure of the targeted memory or merely makes it harder to access remains an open empirical question — one with significant implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.