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Reading Comprehension

Task I

Arthur C. Brooks: "How Loneliness is Tearing America Apart"

1
According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most
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Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their
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relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or “left out”. Thirteen
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percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which
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charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness
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Scale, shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.
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This problem is at the heart of the new book Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and
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How to Heal, by Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. Mr. Sasse argues that
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“loneliness is killing us,” citing, among other things, the skyrocketing rates of suicide
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and overdose deaths in America. […] Mr. Sasse’s assertion that loneliness is killing us
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takes on even darker significance in the wake of the mail-bomb campaign against critics
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of President Trump and the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,
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both of which were perpetrated by isolated – and apparently very lonely – men. Mr.
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Sasse’s book was published before these events, but he presciently described what he
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believes lonely people increasingly do to fill the hole of belonging in their lives: They
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turn to angry politics.
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In the “siloed”, or isolated, worlds of cable television, ideological punditry, campus
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politics and social media, people find a sense of community in the polarized tribes
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forming on the left and the right in America. Essentially, people locate their sense of
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“us” through the contempt peddled about “them” on the other side of the political spectrum.
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There is profit to be made here. The “outrage industrial complex” is what I call the
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industries that accumulate wealth and power by providing this simulacrum of community
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that people crave – but cannot seem to find in real life.
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Why are we becoming so lonely? One reason is the changing nature of work. Work
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is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships;
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surely many of your closest friendships – perhaps even your relationship with
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your spouse – started in the workplace. Yet the reality of the workplace is rapidly attenuating,
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as people hop from job to job, and from city to city, as steady work becomes
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harder to find and the “gig” economy grows.
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Mr. Sasse worries even more, however, about a pervasive feeling of homelessness:
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Too many Americans don’t have a place they think of as home – a “thick” community
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in which people know and look out for one another and invest in relationships that are
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not transient. To adopt a phrase coined in Sports Illustrated, one might say we increas35
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ingly lack that “hometown gym on a Friday night feeling”.
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Mr. Sasse finds this phrase irresistible and warmly relates it to his own life growing
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up in Fremont, Nebraska, a town of 26,000 residents. He describes the high school
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sports events on Friday nights that drew the townspeople together in a common love
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for their neighbors and community that made most differences – especially political
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differences – seem trivial. He relates with 40 deep fondness the feelings he experienced,
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after moving away for a couple of decades for school and work, when he returned to
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Fremont’s small-town life with his family, and the deep sense of belonging it created.
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In what might be called “the social capital of death”, Mr. Sasse charmingly describes
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the sense of being rooted that it gives him, at a robust and healthy 46, to own a burial
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plot for himself in Fremont’s local cemetery. A précis of Mr. Sasse’s recommendations
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to America thus might be this: Go where you get that hometown-gym-on-a-Fridaynight
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feeling, put down roots and make plans to fertilize the soil.
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That can be a tricky proposition for many of us. On reading the book, I asked myself
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where I might get that hometown-gym feeling, where I have natural roots, where I can
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imagine being buried. No specific place came to mind. I have no Fremont – not even
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Seattle, my hometown, which is a perfectly nice place, but one I unsentimentally left
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behind 35 years ago.
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All this is particularly germane to my wife and me at the moment, as we prepare to
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move from Maryland to Massachusetts in the coming months. We fear the loneliness
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we are sure to feel as we enter a completely new place where neither of us grew up or
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has ever lived. Is a thick community and the happiness it brings out of reach for rootless
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cosmopolitans like us?
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I recently put these questions to Mr. Sasse. He told me I had it all wrong – that
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moving back home and going to the gym on Friday aren’t actually the point; rather,
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the trick is “learning how to intentionally invest in the places where we actually live”.
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In other words, being a member of a community isn’t about whether I have a Fremont.
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It isn’t about how I feel about any place I have lived, nor about my fear of isolation in
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a new city. It is about the neighbor I choose to be in the community I wind up calling
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my home.
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And there lies the challenge to each of us in a country suffering from loneliness and
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ripped apart by political opportunists seeking to capitalize on that isolation. Each of us
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can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors
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and generous friends we wish we had.
Aus: Arthur C. Brooks: “How Loneliness is Tearing America Apart.”, The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2018, slightly adapted, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/opinion/loneliness-political-polarization.html, From The New York Times, accessed June 2, 2021
Instructions:
  • Tick the correct answer or answers as indicated.
  • Provide a quotation from the text to support each correct answer: the line number(s) plus the first three and the last three words of the quotation.
  • If the quotation is six words or shorter, write it down in full.
0
Example
true false
Loneliness has become a pressing problem in the US.
lines: 1 - 2 "... most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness ..."
1
Complete the sentence.
According to the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, young people todaythan
(1P)
2
Tick the two correct statements.
In his book, Mr Sasse proposes that ...
loneliness leads to self-destruction.
extremism leads to loneliness.
hate leads to isolation.
isolation leads to fury.
fear leads to violence.
  • quote for first correct statement:
    line(s):
  • quote for second correct statement:
    line(s):
(2P)
3
Complete the sentence.
In modern society, people develop a feeling of identity by
(1P)
4
Tick the correct answer.
The author characterizes the sense of belonging propagated by certain commercial platforms as being …
destructive
addictive
costly
fake
line(s):
(1P)
5
Complete the sentence.
In the world of work nowadays, a sense of belongingbecause
(1P)
6
Complete the sentence.
Mr Sasse’s experiences in Fremont prove that people can get along despite opposing views. He cites the example of
(1P)
7
Tick the correct statement.
Mr Sasse’s recipe for finding a sense of belonging is to …
become a member of a sports club.
be brave and face your own death.
return to where you grew up.
settle down for good.
line(s):
(1P)
8
Tick the correct statement.
Looking at his own situation, the author wonders whether …
growing roots is attractive for him and his wife.
finding a place he could call home is possible.
moving state was the right decision.
leaving Seattle was a mistake.
line(s):
(1P)
9
Tick the correct statement.
In conclusion, Mr Sasse says that home is where you feel …
committed
protected
accepted
loved
line(s):
(1P)
(content 10 VP)