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Högskoleprovet Vår 2024
/ Provpass 1 – Verbal del (HPVAR2024P1)
ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPVAR2024P1)
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Daylight Saving Time
Ask Americans why they still turn their clocks backward and forward twice a year, and they’ll likely cite the same reason: farmers said they needed more daylight in the field. This, however, is mostly a myth. While the farm lobby did participate in the policy debate a century ago, they were actually lobbying against daylight saving time (DST). So who lobbied for DST if not the farmers? Industrialists and politicians, including President Woodrow Wilson, who thought that increasing daylight hours would decrease demand for electricity. Data remains mixed on whether DST does, in fact, reduce energy consumption to a significant degree. But it has succeeded in another one of its initial goals: getting more people to shop. That trend continues for many retailers today.
What is implied here in connection with DST in the U.S.?
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Yawning Birds
Many vertebrates yawn – but only humans, dogs, chimps and a species of rodent find yawns contagious. Now we can add budgies to the list. Researchers placed budgies in adjacent cages, either with a barrier between them or with nothing obstructing their view. When the birds could see each other, they were around three times as likely to yawn within five minutes of a yawn from their neighbour. Videos of budgies yawning also caused them to follow suit. Contagious yawning is linked with empathetic processes, according to researchers, so the finding suggests social non-mammals may have basic forms of empathy.
What, specifically, is new about the research reported?
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Perhaps it is the hours spent in archives or sipping tea at conferences, but there can be few who value old jokes as much as historians do. The first efforts to recover the humour of the past were made in the 1970s with the early stirrings of cultural history and, since then, it has become a well-trodden path to explore past mentalities. Laughter is a fundamental human characteristic – the very thing that separates us from animals, if you follow Aristotle – but the subjects we see fit to laugh at change over time. The theory is simple: if you can ‘get’ the jokes of the past, you can understand the interests and sensibilities of the people who inhabited it.
Penelope Corfield set out to do just this in her 1997 article, ‘Laughing at the Learned’. Taking readers on a romp through 18th- and 19th-century jokes about lawyers, medical experts and clergymen, Corfield exposed the degree of anxiety felt at the increasing power of the ‘learned professions’. They occupied a privileged position by virtue of their specialist knowledge and were thus well placed to take the laity for a ride, should they be so inclined. Jokes, argued Corfield, were a means both to voice discontent and to fight back. By serving up a barrage of ‘hostile wit’, ordinary people could exercise ‘informal moral controls’.
Would the people telling the jokes have agreed with this assessment? As research has developed, the field has broadened to consider not just what was funny in the past, but also what people thought about their jokes. It has become clear that, between the 16th and 18th centuries, laughter was subjected to a degree of fascination and scrutiny seldom matched before or since. It occupied some of the finest minds of the period, from Thomas More to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jonathan Swift: all penned their thoughts on our risible faculty. Amid the theories, we find some strong support for Corfield’s thesis. The notion that satire generated a species of laughter that was corrective in impulse had been established in Antiquity and was upheld in Renaissance England, so that by the 18th century it was commonplace. Yet this alone does not explain the rampant popularity of jokes at the expense of the powerful.
Along with the learned professions, politicians were (as ever) easy targets: those deemed unprincipled or selfinterested might find themselves likened to a weathercock that turns its backside upon every wind, or a Thames waterman who looks one way but rows another. There were jokes about elites and their fashions: strutting fops so doused in orange-flower perfume that they had to keep up a swift pace for fear of suffocation. And jestbooks contained countless tales of plucky underdogs outwitting a social superior.
The frequency of such jokes was not lost on contemporaries and it prompted deep consideration of laughter’s causes. One of the key theories was that we laugh when we perceive ill-suited pairings of ideas, images or situations. In particular, the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson believed that there was something comical in juxtaposing an object, person or event of great seriousness with one that was not. Thus, he observed, ‘any little accident befalling a person of great gravity’ would do the trick every time. The ‘dirtying of a decent dress’ would fit the bill, but so too would seeing the great and good humbled. Indeed, one newspaper article in 1741 conceded that ‘nothing is so exquisite an intellectual tickling’. Laughing at the powerful was not just a ‘pointed weapon’; it was also supremely enjoyable.
Perhaps this also explains why – as Corfield noted – our tendency to laugh at experts lives on, even if the particular experts bearing the satirical brunt vary from one news cycle to the next. When Corfield was writing in 1997 it was the nation’s teachers; now they are off the hook, but a wave of ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment has brought many others into the firing line. It will be up to historians of the future to make sense of our times, but our jokes will provide them with a good starting point. There will be no shortage of material.
Kate Davison, History Today
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What is the main point in the first paragraph with regard to the study of humour?
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What is Penelope Corfield’s conclusion concerning 18th- and 19th-century jokes?
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What is said about the targets of jokes in 18th-century Britain?
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What was one of the main arguments concerning the basis of humour among 18th-century scholars?
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What is concluded regarding humour in the 18th century?
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Bone Fractures
Antidepressants may be bad for your bones. People who take some selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been found to have a higher risk of fractures, but it wasn’t clear whether this was due to the drug or their depression. Now researcher Patricia Ducy and colleagues have found that giving mice fluoxetine – the active ingredient in Prozac – for six weeks causes them to lose bone mass. The team identified a two-stage process by measuring bones, blood and gene activity. During the first three weeks, bones grew stronger as the fluoxetine impaired osteoclasts, cells that usually deplete bone tissue. But by six weeks, the higher levels of serotonin prompted by the drug disrupted the ability of the hypothalamus region of the brain to promote bone growth. Ducy says this twophase pattern is also seen in people.
What can be concluded in relation to depression, antidepressants and bone fractures?
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Nevada
Nevada has been described as ‘a laboratory for how Americans define freedom’. When settlers arrived, the land’s native peoples broadly comprised the Northern and Southern Paiute, Washoe and Western Shoshone people. In 1860, the Pyramid Lake War was fought between allied native forces and victorious US Army-backed settlers, who had been exerting their freedom by usurping Paiute grazing land and disrupting food supplies.
What is implied here about the US colonization of Nevada?
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White Elephants
Rare, pale-skinned elephants were long considered sacred in Siam (modern-day Thailand), appearing on flags and symbolising royal power. Yet the pachyderm came at a price. Such was their prestige that they could not be used for work, and they required expensive food and specially made housing. According to legend, the kings of Siam presented a white elephant as a punishment-in-disguise to an unruly courtier. They had to accept the gift as a great honour, all the while knowing it would cost them a fortune. Although it is more likely that courtiers cared little for the cost, and it was actually foreign travellers who balked at the amount spent on an elephant, we still use the term to mean an expensive, useless item that is more trouble than it’s worth.
What is implied here about the expression ‘white elephant’?
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