Reading Comprehension Questions for CAT

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In 1879, the German botanist Anton de Bary coined the term symbiosis. People usually think of symbiosis in terms of mutually beneficial relationships, but scientifically it’s a catch-all for any relationship-harmonious or antagonistic, parasitic or neighborly-between two different organisms. The details are left unclear.

Just two years later, while studying marine creatures under a microscope, de Bary’s compatriot Karl Andreas Heinrich Brandt realized that the small amber orbs lining their digestive tissues were not part of them, but a type of symbiotic algae. Brandt gave the cells the name “zooxanthellae,” which roughly means “little yellow cell in an animal.” Among the creatures in whom zooxanthellae live are coral, and in the ensuing century scientists discovered that those little yellow cells donate a whopping 90 percent of the sugar they make from photosynthesis to their coral hosts. That energy is why coral colonies-which themselves are aggregations of pencil-eraser-sized polyps-can build reefs so immense they can be seen from outer space.

…Because zooxanthellae lack physical characteristics that distinguish them from one another, there was no visible way to tell if they were different species, even at high magnification. Rowan realized that their DNA had the power to reveal what microscopes could not…. Experiments showed that juvenile coral hosting Durusdinium grew two to three times slower than their siblings hosting other symbionts. Subsequent work found that corals receive only about half as much sugar from Durusdinium as from other species of zooxanthellae.

Some researchers suggested that Durusdinium were, as one paper put it, “selfish opportunists” taking advantage of compromised coral to replace their more-beneficial competitors. Yet Andrew Baker, a coral biologist at the University of Miami, believes that “people have been maybe too willing to label Durusdinium as being selfish. There are many competing ideas. One hypothesis suggests that because Durusdinium abundance is comparatively low-a coral hosting them may contain several hundred, whereas thousands of Breviolum or Cladocopium dwell within each of their coral hosts-they give the impression of selfishness, but on a per-cell basis supply just as much sugar. “It could be that Durusdinium are doing the best they can, you know?” Baker says.

Then there’s the so-called Tenacious D hypothesis, which proposes that Durusdinium isn’t necessarily heat-tolerant. Rather, they evade notice by coral immune systems, which play a role in the bleaching process and may become more reactive during periods of heat-induced stress.

If Durusdinium were selfish, they would act like parasites, feeding their host just barely enough to keep it alive. There’s some evidence for this: Baker and his colleagues followed the fates of more than 100 corals around the central Pacific island of Kiribati during a severe, 10-month-long heat wave. As expected, corals already hosting Durusdinium didn’t bleach-but few survived. Perhaps they were too weakened by Durusdinium’s sparse rations to withstand the stress. However, the study also followed colonies that hosted Cladocopium before the heatwave. As expected, they bleached, but then shifted to Durusdinium and more of these colonies survived. Selfishness is a complicated thing; it depends a lot on context.

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A debate sits at the center of an ongoing war in the world of color research. On the one side stand “universalists,” including the authors of “The World Color Survey” and their colleagues, who believe in a conformity of human perceptual experience: that all people see and name colors in a somewhat consistent way. On the other side are “relativists,” who believe in a spectrum of experience and who are often offended by the very notion that a Westerner's sense of color might be imposed on the interpretation of other cultures and languages. Many researchers, like Alexandre Surrallés, say they stand in the middle: While there are some universals in human perception, Surrallés argues, color terms don’t seem to be among them.

It is almost incomprehensible at first to imagine that the rainbow is not viewed similarly by all people, that there might be more, or fewer, colors in the world than we thought, or that someone might not bother to give colors a name. And yet once one gets beyond the initial, startling blow of these ideas, they begin to seem obvious. There are, after all, no actual lines in a real rainbow. There’s no reason to think that orange is any more or less a legitimate color than, say, cyan, or that one culture’s list of colors is more “real” than another’s. Or is there?

… In the early 1960s, Paul Kay met Brent Berlin. Both were anthropologists, and they each had done fieldwork for their graduate research with two totally different and unrelated peoples: Kay with Tahitians in the South Pacific and Berlin with the Tzeltal of the Mexican highlands. In comparing notes, they realized a strange coincidence. Both researchers had assumed that it would be very hard to learn the local words for colors, since the textbooks at that time said that different cultures would divide up the color spectrum essentially “on a whim,” says Kay. A given culture might have any number of words for different kinds of red, for example, or not distinguish red from yellow, without much rhyme or reason. Yet both researchers had found most of the colors in the languages of the peoples they were studying to be roughly the same as in English, with one major exception: Each language had only a single word for green and blue. "We were just chatting one day and discovered we had the same experience, and we just thought, ‘Wow, everything we were taught was wrong,’” remembers Kay.

… When looking for evidence of a universal experience of color, one might wonder if there’s something hard-wired in the human eye that shapes our color perception. There doesn’t seem to be a simple connection. Most of us have three types of cones, or light receptors, that are optimized to detect different colors or wavelengths of light. With these, most people can distinguish millions of distinct shades, though of course we don’t have names for them all, and whether we see exactly the same things as each other is debatable.

Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber-utopians” had oversold the liberatory potential of the Internet. His latest book, the much-reviewed To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, continues in this vein, presenting a polemical critique of those who too readily embrace digital technology as a tool for freedom and democracy...

In your book you write against what you call “technological solutionism”—an endemic ideology that recasts complex social phenomena like politics, public health, education, and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!” How did you come to choose the phrase “technological solutionism” to describe the approach you’re criticizing?

The analysis was there all along, but the idea of solutionism didn’t occur to me until the very end. I wrote most of the book in Belarus last summer, and when I was flying back to the States, reading about urban planning and architecture on the plane, I stumbled upon this word. I had been using the phrase “silicon mentality” but it didn’t have the same zing as “technological solutionism.” Solutionism travels very well—you see people taking it up and applying it in their own fields.

Aren’t human beings solutionist, technological creatures by nature? Do you really think it’s a historically specific, contemporary phenomenon?

It’s a good point—that solutionism is part of our normal problem-solving apparatus. But clearly something has changed. I open the book by talking about the proliferation of sensors anywhere and everywhere, the portability of smart phones, the ubiquity of social networks, et cetera. A new problem-solving infrastructure is here; new types of solutions become possible that weren’t possible 15 years ago. The way in which we have redefined things like inefficiency or ambiguity or opacity as problematic has nothing to do with deep ideas about political philosophy (in the case of politics) or criminal justice (in the case of crime) but has to do instead with this wonderful new infrastructure for problem-solving: Why not introduce it to solve all these problems we can suddenly see? And so citizens are being asked to do things they previously didn’t have to do or didn’t have to worry about. So in that sense, I understand the current state of solutionism through the prism of the kind of problem-solving approaches that overtake governance...

The problem that I see is not just the fact that we have a lot of new technologies that suddenly have become much more powerful than they were 10, 15, even 100 years ago; the problem that I see is how those technologies are brought together under the umbrella of the “Internet” and are assumed to have a uniform, autonomous dynamic by which they ought to be understood and governed. My book is mostly a study of the discourse of Internet-centrism created by pundits and technology bloggers and cyberlawyers...

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In a lab in London, new born chicks took the first steps of their life and unwittingly became part of solving one of the brain’s bigger mysteries. In a simple test, researchers placed the downy animals, hatched after less than a day in complete darkness, one at a time into a special box. Two screens on opposite sides of the box played videos of moving orange balls, one moving upward, the other downward. By design, the videos were the first things these chicks saw in their lives—and, thanks to their sideways-facing eyes, they saw both at once. Computer software tracked the chick’s movements, and the results were clear. Over the course of 20 minutes, most of the chicks hesitantly toddled over to the end of the box with the upward-moving ball, confirming what scientists suspected: Even without any previous visual experiences, chicks are attracted to objects moving against gravity. The discovery is the latest development in the scientific investigation of how the minds of animals and humans prepare them for life. The preference for upward-moving objects represents the first time a stimulus this simple has been shown to trigger attention in chicks before they have any life experience.

Biologists call the mechanisms that assist animals in their earliest moments “evolutionary predispositions” or “priors.” These impulses are built into the brain from birth and guide an animal’s decisions before it has any lived experiences. Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Birkbeck and co-author of the new study, arrived at the chick experiment from her research on how the human brain adapts to gravity. Studying how predispositions work in humans is difficult, says Ferrè, as babies take time to develop complex skills. By the time human infants are able to easily move and respond to stimuli, they have already spent significant time learning. Chicks, however, can perform relatively complex actions very soon after birth. That makes them prime candidates for exploring how predispositions function.

In the experiment the chick has no experience whatsoever—never seen any object, anything moving around, zero. When the chicks observed the balls, they not only investigated the ball that appeared to work against the pull of gravity, but also approached it first and faster, in addition to spending more time exploring it. The behavior not only shows an innate predisposition for objects that move against gravity, but it also shows that the chicks have some understanding—whether conscious or unconscious—of how gravity works. Why this preference for objects that move against gravity exists at all remains unclear. The researchers of this study speculate that it could be because the ability to self-propel against the force of gravity is more likely to be associated with living animals. Going against gravity in a consistent way is associated with animate objects in the ecological world because usually you see that water flows down or a rock falls down. Inanimate objects, on the other hand, are unlikely to move consistently against gravity.

Throughout our long history, people have always experienced panic, probably even panic attacks. Today, we have sophisticated medications - especially benzodiazepines - that people can use to help them with this panic. Benzodiazepines act fast, and can induce a calming or even euphoric high, which increases the risk of both psychological and physical dependence. But while benzodiazepines are relatively new, panic is very old. So what did humans in other times, civilisations and settings do when they panicked?

Some people who experienced panic attacks got burned as witches or accused of being possessed by demons or evil spirits. But it's also true that the beginnings of a more clinical understanding of panic weren't as far off as you might think. Greek physicians, such as Hippocrates in the 5th century BCE, described symptoms resembling modern panic attacks - such as heart palpitations, dizziness, and fainting - but classified them under a broader condition known as 'hysteria'.

Later, in The Canon of Medicine (1025) - yes, 1025 - Avicenna (Ibn Sina), described forms of sudden fear and anxiety as part of neuropsychological disorders. Though his explanations still blended physical and spiritual reasoning, his work laid the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of mental health. He wrote: 'The movements of the soul begin in the heart and manifest in the body,' suggesting a deep interconnection between mind and physiology. Ibn Sina also discussed what we would now call psychosomatic illness, noting that 'strong emotions may alter the pulse and colour of the face.' His holistic view - that emotional and spiritual states directly influence physical health - anticipated principles of modern psychosomatic medicine by nearly a millennium.

When it comes to panic attacks, though, force has never really been the answer. Across many cultures, the most effective approach has been to help the mind - or, as Islamic psychology often refers to it, the heart - relax. And for most people, that meant simply cheering up.

Many peoples and societies have understood that 'cheering up' is intimately tied to the senses - especially the ears and eyes. Listening to something soothing often brings comfort. Seeing calming or familiar patterns can promote relaxation. In some cases, an intense or activating sensory pattern might be used to snap someone out of their panicked state.

For example, for many centuries, across the Horn of Africa and in parts of the Middle East such as Egypt and Yemen, the Z'ar ritual has been a communal healing ceremony practised primarily by women. It addresses symptoms that closely resemble modern diagnoses of panic and anxiety disorders: shortness of breath, chest tightness, trembling, and dissociative episodes. But, instead of labelling these experiences as purely psychological, the Z'ar tradition interprets them as signs of possession by a restless spirit.