ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2023P5)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that
correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

Itch

The sensation of itch, which shares many nervous pathways with pain, has long been a mystery. One reason is that it can be conjured up entirely by the brain. Just thinking about something tickly, or even watching someone else scratch, can 1___ us off. Efforts to find out why this is, and why only scratching makes it stop, have led researchers to study how itch is processed in the skin, spinal cord and brain.

Itch, like chronic pain, is a surprisingly common problem. It comes as a side effect of opioid painkillers, the use of which has rocketed in recent years. It also comes with skin conditions, such as eczema, as well as nerve damage, kidney disease and allergies. An estimated one in five of us will experience chronic itch at some point, and current remedies are providing little 2___ .

The most common treatments are antihistamines, which block the part of the immune reaction that causes itching when we are bitten by a bug, for example. Not all itches are immunerelated, however, and antihistamines have proven to be 3___ for most forms of chronic itch.

In recent years, researchers have discovered new kinds of receptors in the skin and spinal cord that play a role in the sensation of itch. They are working to figure out what naturally activates these receptors in the hope of 4___ drugs that can deactivate them.

Further clues on how to tackle itch come from brain imaging studies. Many brain areas activated by pain are also active during itch, but one area that seems distinctively responsive to itch is the precuneus. This brain area is involved in visual processing and memory, says Gil Yosipovich at the University of Miami. “We can’t pinpoint what it does in itch, but it’s 5___ activated with itch as opposed to pain,” he says.

For now, though, the single most effective way to get rid of an itch is what we do instinctively: to scratch.

Stephani Sutherland, New Scientist

Lothar and Theutberga

It is a familiar story: a king dissatisfied with a loveless marriage that had lost its political value, burning to marry another woman accused by some of witchcraft; a group of educated royal advisers frantically devising strategies to make their king’s wishes a reality; an intransigent pope refusing to countenance any remarriage on principle, with a dash of realpolitik thrown in.

The king is Lothar II, great-grandson of Charlemagne; the two women Theutberga and Waldrada; the pope Nicholas I. This was not just a royal divorce scandal – this was the first royal divorce scandal in European history, which raged from 858 to 869.

Earlier medieval kings – including Charlemagne – had extricated themselves from inconvenient unions without much fuss. They had done so, however, from a position of political security. Lothar, at the point of his attempted divorce, was still a young man, fresh to the throne, whose grasp on power could not be taken for granted. Moreover, Lothar II’s wife Theutberga had powerful relatives. This was why he had married her in the first place and it meant the king had to tread with circumspection in getting rid of her.

So Lothar probably thought he was being clever when, in 858, he orchestrated an ordeal at his palace of Aachen. To test the truthfulness of rumours allegedly circulating that she had had incestuous and unnatural sex with her brother before marrying him, Theutberga, or rather her champion, was compelled to plunge a hand into boiling water. For reasons which are still hard to explain, but which presumably reflect a lack of consensus at Lothar’s court, the champion passed the ordeal unscathed.

In response to this remarkable setback, the king turned the matter over to two church councils in 860. He doubtless reckoned that his bishops would prove more reliable than the direct judgement of God in the failed ordeal – and so they did. After a dubious show trial in which Theutberga supposedly confessed that the rumours about her were true, the councils dutifully confirmed that Lothar could leave his queen and marry again. This he duly did, making a queen of his mistress Waldrada – who some suspected had bewitched him, such was his emotional attachment to her.

But in handing the case over to the bishops, the young king had committed an error which ultimately brought down his kingdom. It was effectively an invitation for others to get involved. The rulers of the kingdoms on either side of Lothar’s realm were his two older uncles, also descendants of the great Charlemagne – and with the dream of reuniting Charlemagne’s fragmented empire never very far from their thoughts. The king of the West Franks, Charles ‘the Bald’, and the king of the East Franks, Louis ‘the German’, kept close eyes on Lothar’s difficulties.

Examining the case, Hincmar, the great archbishop of Reims, concluded that the councils of Aachen had erred: Christian marriage was indissoluble and divorce was not possible. If Lothar and Theutberga were man and wife, they could perhaps separate – but never remarry.

That ‘if’ mattered: Hincmar had slipped in a discreet get-out clause. He suggested that, were Theutberga indeed guilty of the monstrous charges laid against her, then according to canon law she was incapable of being married. He had left the door to Lothar’s remarriage ajar.

That door was slammed shut not by Frankish kings or their clerical servants, but by Pope Nicholas I. As soon as he heard about the case, Nicholas wanted to establish the facts and definitively resolve the matter. As the king’s arguments grew ever more convoluted and contradictory, so the pope grew increasingly infuriated. He eventually excommunicated Waldrada and threatened to do the same to the king. Lothar crumbled and unwillingly took back Theutberga as his queen. He died, still lobbying to leave her, in 869. This marked a milestone for papal authority. Even if Nicholas’ immediate successors were not quite so forceful, henceforth kings always had to reckon with the possibility of interference in their marital affairs.

Charles West, History Today