READING PASSAGE 1
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Learning to Walk
These days the feet of a typical city dweller rarely encounter terrain any more uneven than a crack in the pavement. While that may not seem like a problem, it turns out that by flattening our urban environment we have put ourselves at risk of a surprising number of chronic illnesses and disabilities. Fortunately, the commercial market has come to the rescue with a choice of products. Research into the idea that flat floors could be detrimental to our health was pioneered back in the late 1960s in Long Beach, California. Podiatrist Charles Brantingham and physiologist Bruce Beekman were concerned with the growing epidemic of high blood pressure, varicose veins and deep-vein thromboses and reckoned they might be linked to the uniformity of the surfaces that we tend to stand and walk on.
The trouble, they believed, was that walking continuously on flat floors, sidewalks and streets concentrates forces on just a few areas of the foot. As a result, these surfaces are likely to be far more conducive to chronic stress syndromes than natural surfaces, where the foot meets the ground in a wide variety of orientations. They understood that the anatomy of the foot parallels that of the human hand – each having 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments – and that modern lifestyles waste all this potential flexibility.
Brantingham and Beekman became convinced that the damage could be rectified by making people wobble. To test their ideas, they got 65 factory workers to try standing on a variable terrain floor – spongy mats with varying degrees of resistance across the surface. This modest irregularity allowed the soles of the volunteers’ feet to deviate slightly from the horizontal each time they shifted position. As the researchers hoped, this simple intervention made a huge difference, within a few weeks. Even if people were wobbling slightly, it activated a host of muscles in their legs, which in turn helped pump blood back to their hearts. The muscle action prevented the pooling of blood in their feet and legs, reducing the stress on the heart and circulation. Yet decades later, the flooring of the world’s largest workplaces remains relentlessly smooth. Earlier this year, however, the idea was revived when other researchers in the US announced findings from a similar experiment with people over 60. John Fisher and colleagues at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene designed a mat intended to replicate the effect of walking on cobblestones*.
In tests funded by the National Institute of Aging, they got some 50 adults to walk on the toots in their bare feet for less than an hour, three times a week. After 16 weeks, these people showed marked improvements in mobility, and even a significant reduction in blood pressure. People in a control group who walked on ordinary floors also improved but not as dramatically. The mats are now available for purchase and production is being scaled up. Even so, demand could exceed supply if this footstimulating activity really is a ‘useful nonpharmacological approach for preventing or controlling hypertension of older adults, as the researchers believe. They are not alone in recognising the benefits of cobblestones. Reflexologists have long advocated walking on textured surfaces to stimulate so-called ‘acupoints’ on the soles of the feet. They believe that pressure applied to particular spots on the foot connects directly to particular organs of the body and somehow enhances their function. In China, spas, apartment blocks and even factories promote their cobblestone paths as healthful amenities. Fisher admits he got the concept from regular visits to the country. Here, city dwellers take daily walks along cobbled paths for five or ten minutes, perhaps several times a day, to improve their health. The idea is now taking off in Europe too.
People in Germany, Austria and Switzerland can now visit ‘barefoot parks’ and walk along ‘paths of the senses – with mud, logs, stone and moss underfoot. And it is not difficult to construct your own path with simple everyday objects such as stones or bamboo poles. But if none of these solutions appeal, there is another option. A new shoe on the market claims to transform flat, hard, artificial surfaces into something like uneven ground. ‘These shoes have an unbelievable effect,’ says Benno Nigg, an exercise scientist at Calgary University in Canada.
Known as the Masai Barefoot Technology, the shoes have rounded soles that cause you to rock slightly when you stand still, exercising the small muscles around the ankle that are responsible for stability. Forces in the joint are reduced, putting less strain on the system, Nigg claims.
Some of these options may not appeal to all consumers and there is a far simpler alternative.
If the urban environment is detrimental to our health, then it is obvious where we should turn. A weekend or even a few hours spent in the countryside could help alleviate a sufferer’s aches and pains, and would require only the spending of time.
However, for many modern citizens, the countryside is not as accessible as it once was and is in fact a dwindling resource. Our concrete cities are growing at a terrifying rate – perhaps at the same rate as our health problems.
How the mind ages
The way mental function changes is largely determined by three factors-mental lifestyle, the impact of chronic disease and flexibility of the mind.
Experiments have shown that younger monkeys consistently outperform their older colleagues on memory tests. Formerly, psychologists concluded that memory and other mental functions in humans deteriorate over time because of changes in the brain. Thus mental decline after young adulthood appeared inevitable. The truth, however, is not quite so simple.
Stanley Rapoport at the National Institute of Health in the United States measured the flow of blood in the brains of old and young people as they completed different tasks. Since blood flow reflects neural activity. Rapoport could compare which networks of neurons were the same, the neural networks they used were significantly different. The older subjects used different internal strategies to accomplish comparable results at the same time,’Rapoport says. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, psychologist Timothy Salthouse compared a group of fast and accurate typists of college age with another group in their 60s. Both groups typed 60 words a minute. The older typists, it turned out, achieved their speed with cunning little strategies that made them more efficient than their younger counterparts. They made fewer finger shifts, gaining a fraction of a second here and there. They also read ahead in the test. The neural networks involved in typing appear to have been reshaped to compensate for losses in motor skills or other age changes.
In fact, there’s evidence that deterioration in mental functions can actually be reversed. Neuropsychologist Marion Diamond at the University of California has shown that mental activity maks neurons sprout new dendrites* which establish connections with other neurons. The dendrites shrink when the mind is idle. For example,’when a rat is kept in isolation, the animal’s brain shrinks, but if we put that rat with other rats in a large cage and give them an assortment of toys, we can show, after four days, significant differences in its brain.’says Diamond. After a month in the enriched surroundings, the whole cerebral cortex has expanded, as has its blood supply.’But even in the enriched surroundings, rats get bored unless the toys are varied. Animals are just like we are. They need stimulation,’says Diamond. A busy mental lifestyle keeps the human mind fit, says Warner Schaie of Penn State University. ‘People who regularly participate in challenging tasks retain their intellectual abilities better than mental couch potatoes.’
In his studies, Schaie detected a decline in mental function among individuals who underwent lengthy stays in hospital for chronic illness. He postulated it might be due to the mental passivity encouraged by hospital routine.
One of the most profoundly important mental functions is memory. Memory exists in more than one form, what we call knowledge- facts- is what psychologists such as Harry Bahrick of Ohio Wesleyan University call semantic memory. Events, conversations and occurrences in time and space, on the other hand, make up episodic memory. It’s true that episodic memory begins to decline when most people are in their 50s, but it’s never perfect at any age.
Probing the longevity of knowledge, Bahrick tested 1,000 high school graduates to see how well they remembered the school subject algebra. Some had completed the course a month before, other 50 years earlier. Surprisingly, he found that a person’s grasp of algebra did not depend on how long ago he’d taken the course. The determining factor was the duration of instruction. Those who had spent only a few months learning algebra forgot most of it within two or three years while others who had been instructed for longer remembered better. According to Bahrick,’the long-term residue of knowledge remains stable over the decades, independent of the age of the person and the memory.’
Perhaps even more important than the ability to remember is the ability to manage memory- a mental function known as metamemory.’You could say metamemory is a byproduct of going to school,’says psychologist Robert Kail of Purdue University,’The question-and-answer process,especially exam taking, helps children learn and teaches them how their memory functions.This may be one reason why the better educated a person is, the more likely they are to perform well in many aspects of life and in psychological assessments: A group of adult novice chess players were compared with a group of child experts at the game. But when asked to remember the patterns of chess pieces arranged on a board, the children won.’ Because they’d played a lot of chess, their knowledge of chess was better organized than that of the adults, and their existing knowledge of chess served as a framework for new memory,’explains Kail. Cognitive style, another factor in maintaining mental function, is what Schaie calls the ability to adapt and roll with life’s punches.’He measured mental flexibility with questions and tests requiring people to carry out in an offbeat way an everyday activity they had done millions of times. One example was asking people to copy a paragraph substituting uppercase letters for lowercase ones. These tests seem silly, but flexible-minded people manage to complete them,’says Schaie. The rigid person responds with tension instead and performs poorly. Those who score highly on tests of cognition at an advanced age are those who tested high in mental flexibility at middle age’.
On a more optimistic note, one mental resource that only improves with time is specialized knowledge. Crystallised intelligence about one’s occupation apparently does not decline at all until at least age 75. Vocabulary is another such specialized form of knowledge. Research clearly shows that vocabulary develops with time. Retired teachers and journalists consistently score higher on tests of vocabulary and general information than college students.