A n s w e r k e y test 1, Paper 1, Reading

Part 3: Is the internet making us stupid?
13 
C: Patricia Greenfield ‘reviewed dozens of studies on how different 
media technologies influence our cognitive abilities’ and looked 
at the results of these studies as a whole. 
14 
B: The University experiment tested how well the students ‘retained 
the lecture’s content’; an earlier experiment showed that the 
more types of information are placed on a screen, the less people 
can remember. 
15 
B: Greenfield concluded that ‘growing use of screen-based media’ 
had resulted in ‘new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive 
processes’ and listed several mental processes that have been 
affected (abstract vocabulary, etc.).
16 
C: It was expected that the people who did a lot of multitasking 
would ‘have gained some mental advantages’ from their 
experience of multitasking but this was not true. In fact, they 
‘weren’t even good at multitasking’ – contrary to the belief that 
people who do a lot of multitasking get good at it.
17 
C: The writer says that the ‘ill effects’ are permanent and the 
structure of the brain is changed. He quotes someone who is 
very worried about this and regards the long-term effect
as ‘deadly’. 
18 
D: The writer uses Ap Dijksterhuis’s research to support his point 
that ‘not all distractions are bad’ – if you are trying to solve a 
problem, it can be better to stop thinking about it for a while 
than to keep thinking about it all the time. 
19 
A: ‘The cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and 
unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking 
either deeply or creatively’ and we stop being capable of 
‘contemplation, reflection and introspection’; ‘unconscious 
thought does not occur’ and our brains become ‘simple signal-
processing units’.