ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPVÅR2023P5)

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.

Vegetarianism

British nineteenth-century proponents of vegetarianism had high hopes for their movement. They tended to see themselves as on the side of history, in the vanguard of moral __1__ . In their imagined future, meat eating would be seen as being as barbarous as slavery, racism and homophobia.

Government data suggests that no more than 2 to 3 per cent of the population eschews meat, while groups with a vested interest bump this up to roughly 5 per cent. Yet, whatever measure you use, it is clear the number of vegetarians has not been rising over recent decades on either side of the Atlantic. __2__, studies suggest that anything between 50 and 84 per cent of those who give up meat eventually go back to being carnivores.

When I became a “sort of” vegetarian 25 years ago, vegetarianism was the only practical alternative to cruelly, intensively reared animal products. But as interest in animal welfare has increased, it has become much easier to buy products certified free-range or organic.

Further, while growing animal feed on viable arable land is wasteful, it makes good sense to graze animals on pastures not __3__ to crops edible by humans and to use by-products of the human food chain to fatten livestock. And to leave all the fish in the sea would be to deprive ourselves of an invaluable resource.

In turn, the health evidence __4__ some, but much less, meat eating: the consensus among dieticians is that the optimal human diet contains relatively small amounts of animal protein and fat.

The vegetarian movement has done society a great __5__ by putting important issues on the agenda. But the most sensible conclusion to draw is that we ought to eat fewer, better-reared animal products. Arguably, in my view the future belongs not to vegetarians and vegans but to discerning “flexitarians” and conscientious omnivores.

Julian Baggini, New Statesman

No Smiling Matter

An endless stream of new discoveries makes science thrilling. But, as any seasoned researcher knows, such novelties are worthless unless they can be replicated. Often, though, replication does not get done as thoroughly as it should be – or even at all. For, as any seasoned researcher also knows, replication is rarely the stuff careers are built on; studies conducted with that goal may even struggle to get published in peer-reviewed journals.

In this context, a recent attempted replication is important, for it actually was published recently in a journal called Psychological Science. Its author was Michael Dufner of the University of Leipzig in Germany. In it, he said that he was unable to replicate a fascinating previous finding which had suggested that people who smile more intensely tend to live longer than those who do not.

The original study, published in 2010 by Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger, then of Wayne State University in Detroit, seemed sound enough. The two researchers had gathered the mugshots of 196 players from the Baseball Register of 1952, which lists the game’s professionals in a given year, and asked a team of volunteers who were blind to the purpose of the experiment to study the players’ smiles and rate their intensity. Dr Abel and Mr Kruger then delved into files that contained information about when the players in their experiment had died – or if, by rare chance, they were still alive. This analysis revealed that players with full smiles were more likely to have lived to a ripe old age than those who had partial smiles or no smiles at all.

Statistically, this was a strong result. The probability that it was the result of chance was one in 50. It was also an intriguing result. It dovetailed well with ideas then emerging that happiness induces biological effects which lead to improved health. Indeed, Dr Dufner often discussed the research with others and, as questions about whether the work had ever been replicated came with increasing frequency, he decided to roll up his sleeves and do so in his own laboratory.

Together with a team of colleagues, he worked with a sample based on the one used in the original study. All of the players in that were included, along with a larger, non-overlapping set of 527 Baseball-Register images of players who were active slightly before, or after, 1952. Just like the researchers in the first experiment, Dr Dufner relied on “blind” volunteers to rate the intensity of the smiles in the images. Of the pictures he worked with, 40% showed no smile, 42% showed a partial smile and 18% showed a full smile.

When Dr Dufner compared these numbers with how long each of the players lived, however, he found no correlation between lifespan and smile intensity in either the original or the extended samples of players. When replications fail in this way, particularly in fields like psychology, critics often argue that “hidden moderators” like differences in time, culture or sample composition between the original study and the replicate are the reason for the failure. What is notable about Dr Dufner’s work is that it did not contain any such factors. The photos were the same. Only the volunteer examiners were different. Somehow, it seemed, the two sets had coded the players’ smiles differently, and in the earlier study the chance result had come to pass, as one time in 50 it must.

To check in detail what had happened, Dr Dufner contacted Dr Abel, the first paper’s senior author, and asked if he could see the original data. Unfortunately, these were unavailable. As Dr Abel explained, he has now retired, and when he did so he “threw out [his] data for the past 40 years. Time to move on.” A cautionary tale, then, of the importance both of replication and of keeping the data that a study is based on safe and sound, just in case they need to be checked again.

The Economist