VSTEP Mock Test #5 - READING

Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions.

For three years, Nguyen Thanh Tuan, 39, and a group of associates had been setting traps and collecting cats across several provinces. Every two to three days, they would gather enough animals and sell them to a middleman named Le Huynh Ba for around 70,000 dong per kilogram. Neither Tuan nor the others seemed to worry about being caught - until the morning of June 11, 2026.

On that day, the Criminal Investigation Division of Ho Chi Minh City Police, known as PC02, announced that it had broken up a large inter-provincial cat theft and trafficking ring. Officers had identified and invited nine people for questioning, including Tuan, his partner Nguyen Thi Thanh Tam, and seven other members of the group. During questioning, the suspects admitted to trapping and collecting cats on a large scale for approximately three years. [I]

The most significant discovery came when police moved quickly to check a key location: the Truc Quynh vehicle depot in My Hanh Commune, Tay Ninh Province. This site had been used by Le Huynh Ba as a transfer point before sending the cats to buyers in other areas. At this location, officers found 45 cages containing around 400 live cats, as well as four foam boxes holding about 80 cats that had already died and were being kept on ice, apparently ready for transport. A further search at an address in Linh Xuan Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, uncovered 21 more cats. In total, the operation rescued and seized more than 500 cats - making it one of the largest cases of its kind ever recorded in the city. [II]

After the rescue, a temporary care area was set up at the PC02 headquarters to look after the surviving animals. Within days, veterinary doctors from Saigon Zoo and Botanical Garden, known locally as Thao Cam Vien, arrived to help. On June 14, the zoo's veterinary team began photographing each cat, numbering them, and recording details such as breed, fur colour, and eye colour. These records were then posted on the zoo's Facebook page to help owners identify their missing pets. The posts quickly attracted thousands of shares and comments from people hoping to find their lost animals. [III]

According to Dr Nguyen Quynh Thien Hao, Head of the Veterinary Team at Saigon Zoo, many of the rescued cats showed signs of stress from being kept in crowded conditions for a long time. Some had wounds from fighting with other cats, while others had breathing or digestive problems. Despite this, after an initial period of fear, many cats began to approach the care workers on their own, rubbing against their legs or lying quietly beside the vets as if searching for a feeling of safety.

Volunteers, university students, and off-duty vets all took part in feeding the cats, cleaning their living spaces, and monitoring their health while the investigation continued. Some people stayed until 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening before going home. Beyond the question of returning cats to their owners, several members of the public also asked online about adopting cats whose owners could not be found. Dr Hao noted that adult cats that have experienced trauma often need extra time to adjust to a new home, but with patience and care, they can recover well. [IV]

Ho Chi Minh City Police announced that anyone who believes their cat was stolen during this period is welcome to contact PC02 directly at 9 Xa Lo Ha Noi Street, Tang Nhon Phu Ward, to identify their pet and support the ongoing investigation.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of graduates cross a quiet but consequential threshold: they enrol in a postgraduate programme, convinced that a master's degree will translate directly into a higher salary and a stronger position in the labour market. Career counsellors and university marketing materials have long reinforced this belief, pointing to statistics showing that advanced degree holders earn more, on average, than those with only a bachelor's qualification. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that for a significant proportion of graduates, the financial return on a postgraduate education is far more modest, and sometimes negative, than they were led to expect. [I]

The cost of obtaining a master's degree has risen sharply in recent decades, making the financial stakes considerably higher than they once were. In the United States, the average total cost of a two-year master's programme, including tuition, fees, and living expenses, now exceeds $73,000, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Many graduates finance this through student loans, and the average debt carried specifically from a master's programme stands at approximately $54,000. A 2024 analysis by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, which examined earnings data from over 50,000 degree programmes across American universities, found that more than 40 percent of master's degrees produce a negative return on investment - meaning that graduates are unlikely to recover the full financial cost of their studies through increased lifetime earnings. This figure represents a striking reversal from the longstanding assumption that postgraduate study is, by definition, a sound financial investment. [II]

Rachel Simmons, a graduate career adviser at a mid-sized public university in Ohio, observes the same pattern of disillusionment each spring. "Students finish their master's, and they expect to walk into interviews and carry more weight," she says. "What actually happens is that many employers look at the CV and immediately ask about hands-on experience. The degree itself barely comes up." Her observation is consistent with wider survey data. A 2024 report by the graduate recruitment platform Greenhouse found that the majority of hiring managers now rank demonstrated work experience above formal qualifications when assessing entry-level and junior candidates. Faced with this reality, graduates typically pursue one of three responses: they accept positions at salary levels similar to those offered to bachelor's graduates, they enrol in unpaid or low-paid internships to build the practical experience that their degree did not provide, or they delay entering the workforce altogether while continuing to apply. For those who take the first path, the prevailing sentiment is one of resignation rather than satisfaction - a reluctant adjustment to a market that has not delivered what they were promised. [III]

Beyond the question of employer attitudes, a third and frequently overlooked obstacle concerns the structure of the graduate job market itself. The number of postgraduate degree holders in the United States increased by approximately 9 percent between 2011 and 2021, while the number of senior roles specifically requiring a master's degree grew at a considerably slower rate. This mismatch has produced a saturated market in which a credential that once distinguished a candidate now functions merely as a baseline. According to a 2023 survey conducted by the National Union of Students in the United Kingdom, around one-third of recent master's graduates reported that their current role did not require the level of qualification they held. Those who had studied in fields such as humanities, social sciences, and general business administration were disproportionately represented in this group, with many conceding that, had they known the employment landscape in advance, they would have made a different choice. [IV]

Last spring, my aunt forwarded me a voice message she had received on her phone. A man with a confident, clinical tone was claiming that a common fever medication caused organ failure in children, urging parents to throw away their supplies immediately. I checked three prestigious medical sources. The claim was entirely false. When I told her this, she paused and then said: "But so many people shared it. Why would they all share it if it were not true?" That question has stayed with me ever since, because it captures something that no fact-check alone can fix.

The scale of the problem is staggering. In February 2020, the World Health Organization publicly identified that the COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an "infodemic" - an overabundance of information, accurate and otherwise, that was making it dangerously difficult for the public to identify trustworthy guidance. The consequences were measurable. Vaccine hesitancy, fuelled in large part by misinformation circulating on social media platforms, had already been listed among the WHO's top ten threats to global health as early as 2019. Meanwhile, the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveyed more than 32,000 people across 28 countries, found that peers, ordinary individuals with no scientific credentials, are now regarded as equally trustworthy as scientists when it comes to information about new developments. This is not a sign of rising public confidence. It is a sign of eroding institutional authority. [A]

Why has this happened? The answer lies partly in the architecture of social media itself. Platforms designed to maximise engagement have, by their very nature, rewarded content that provokes emotion over content that informs. A 2020 analysis of tweets during the pandemic found that posts containing misinformation or unverifiable claims were more widely shared than accurate scientific reporting, because alarming or sensational content is inherently more compelling to human psychology than cautious, qualified statements. Scientists, trained to communicate uncertainty honestly, are structurally disadvantaged in this environment. A researcher who says "the evidence strongly suggests, but further studies are needed" will almost always lose ground to a confident voice online claiming to have definitive answers. [B]

Calls for social media companies to address the problem have met with limited results. Voluntary content moderation policies have proven inconsistent and easily circumvented, while proposals for stricter regulation have stalled in the face of fierce resistance from the technology industry, which frames any external oversight as a threat to free expression. [C] Yet many scientists and public health experts argue that the scientific community itself must also change. Communicating only through peer-reviewed journals and press releases is no longer sufficient. Researchers who engage directly with the public, through accessible formats, plain language, and dialogue rather than monologue, are consistently more effective at building trust than those who retreat behind institutional walls. [D]

The challenge, then, is not simply one of correcting false claims as they arise. It is a structural problem requiring a structural response: platforms that prioritise accuracy alongside engagement, scientists who learn to communicate as clearly as they think, and a public better equipped to evaluate the sources they encounter. Facts, it turns out, are necessary but not sufficient. What the current crisis demands is not more information, but better ways of deciding what to believe.

The Microbiome–Gut–Brain Axis

A. The earliest evidence for the profound connection between human digestion and mental states comes from historical medical records of melancholia in ancient Greece that are over 2,000 years old. Ancient as their origins are, these clinical observations, which are still debated today, are already biologically insightful - they detail a network linking stomach distress to cognitive decline, so scientists think gut–brain interactions must have evolved much earlier, perhaps alongside early vertebrates. But despite knowing approximately when the mind–gut link first appeared in literature, researchers are still far from answering exactly how it operates.

B. Today, there are several competing theories for how intestinal bacteria alter human cognition. Some question whether microbes directly interface with the brain at all, asserting instead that they trigger cascading reactions in the gut lining or the heart of the enteric nervous system. Some even say this signalling might occur independently through multiple pathways simultaneously.

C. Most scientists agree that microbial influence travels through a primary channel where chemical metabolites act as the principal messengers, guiding signals through our physiological systems. According to this "Metabolite World" hypothesis, bacterial byproducts are the crux molecules for gut–brain communication, and only take a backseat when sudden systemic inflammation, which overrides localised signals far more forcefully than metabolites, develops.

D. Short-chain fatty acids are functionally comparable to neurotransmitters in some respects, and today carry out numerous important functions across our organs, including acting as transitional molecules between gut fermentation and neural synthesis, and functioning as an on-and-off switch for some mood-regulating genes.

E. But the Metabolite World hypothesis does not explain how undirected bacterial chemistry first achieved such targeted cognitive control. Like complex hormones, microbial metabolites are diverse compounds made of repeating units of smaller biochemicals that link together in very specific, patterned ways. While there are scientists who think this chemical precision could have arisen spontaneously through random microbial mutations, others say the odds of such a thing happening are astronomical.

F. "The emergence of such specific neuro-chemical coordination, given the way random bacterial chemistry functions, is incredibly improbable. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime evolutionary long shot," said Elena Rostova, a neurobiologist at the University of Zurich. "To adopt this, you have to believe human biology was incredibly lucky."

G. But "astronomical" is a relative term. In his book The Enteric Mind, physiologist Marcus Thorne entertains another possibility, drawing on evolutionary biology. Even if any single chemical signal reaching a neural receptor is a low-probability event, Thorne argues, natural selection does not require precision to appear fully formed. Any random microbial signal that happened to benefit the host, however imprecisely, would have conferred a survival advantage, causing it to persist and be refined across generations. Over vast stretches of evolutionary time, what began as non-specific chemical noise could gradually be shaped by selection into targeted communication. "The odds of a useful signal appearing at random are not astronomical," Thorne concludes, "once you factor in the millions of sensory receptor cells lining the gut wall and billions of years of selective pressure to work with."

H. Rostova does not think it is necessary to invoke the gradual refinement of complex neural structures to explain the earliest communication. Instead, she thinks gut–brain signalling began with immune cells that were far simpler and less specialised than vagus neurons. Unlike metabolites, which must achieve precise molecular targeting to influence neural receptors, immune cells operate through broad, non-specific inflammatory reactions. The biological equivalent of a general alarm rather than a targeted message. This lower requirement for molecular precision is precisely what makes the immune pathway more probable. "If you fall back to a simpler immune theory," Rostova concluded, "the odds are not astronomical anymore, because the immune system does not need to find the right lock for the right key - it simply raises the alarm."