IELTSwithJurabek

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

What's Happening to Our Food?

A We now know a lot about what food does to the body and the importance of a healthy diet. But what if modern intensive farming methods have affected the mineral and vitamin content of what we eat? Donald Davis, at the University of Texas, has found notable declines in nutrients in crops including tomatoes, eggplants and squash. Davis blames agricultural practices that emphasise quantity over quality. High-yielding crops produce more food, more rapidly, but they can't make or absorb nutrients at the same pace, so the nutrition is diluted. 'It's like taking a glass of orange juice and adding water to it. If you do that, the concentration of nutrients that was in the original juice drops,' he says. But the idea that modern farming produces less nourishing crops remains controversial, since nutrient levels can vary widely according to the variety of plant, the year of harvest and the time of harvest.

B But intensive farming has also led to a huge increase in food supply, which has undoubtedly had a positive effect on our diet and health. 'Evidence suggests that some nutrients have fallen, particularly trace elements such as copper in vegetables,' says Paul Finglas, at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich. 'Foods are now bred for yield, and not necessarily nutritional composition. But I don't think that is a problem, because we eat a wider range of foods today than we did 10 years ago, let alone 40 years ago'. Eric Decker, professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, agrees. If nutrients are declining, the losses are insignificant, he says. 'Over the last century, lifespans have got longer, people are bigger and stronger, and a lot of that has to do with the food supply being better.' Even Davis agrees that any differences in nutrient levels are relatively small. 'Despite their declines, fruit and vegetables are still our richest source of many nutrients, and you can make up for it by eating more,' he says. 'But we know that many people don't get the recommended amounts of nutrients such as iron, magnesium, and calcium. They aren't overt deficiencies in the usual sense, but they increase susceptibility to lots of different problems.'

C In addition to changes in its production, food is being transported for ever-increasing distances. Fruit and vegetables in supermarkets might look shiny and fresh, but often they were picked several days earlier. Some nutrients, particularly vitamin C and folic acid, begin to deteriorate as soon as picking happens, but manufacturers can take action to minimise this. 'Lots of these reactions are driven by enzymes,' says Carol Wagstaff, from the University of Reading, UK, who points out that chilling is the best way of slowing down such reactions. That said, if you are choosing between organic fruit or vegetables from a distant country or locally grown, non-organic ones, always opt for home-grown, she says. 'From a nutritional standpoint, go for the shortest possible supply chain rather than the production method.'

Many kinds of mass-produced fruit and veg - most famously tomatoes - are harvested unripe before being transported to supermarkets. Wagstaff agrees that this may cause some loss of flavour, compared with a tomato that you have grown at home, and left on the plant until it's absolutely ready to eat. 'But there's no way you could do that at a commercial level, because of the bruising and other types of damage that would occur if ripe fruits were transported through a typical supply chain,' she says. In addition, each method of shipping and storing foods has different effects on the compounds they contain. Vitamin C, for example, breaks down in the dark, whereas glucosinolates - found in vegetables like cabbage - deplete in the light.

D Surprisingly, frozen fruit and vegetables are often nutritionally better than fresh. 'Frozen peas are much more nutritious than those you buy ready to shell,' says Catherine Collins, principal dietician at St George's Hospital in London. What's more, frozen foods often have fewer additives. 'Freezing is a preservative,' she says. Similarly, processing has become a maligned word in the context of food, but there are some cases where it enhances a food's health benefits. For example, lycopene - a compound tomatoes are rich in, and which has been shown to protect against certain diseases - is much more readily absorbed by humans from tomato paste than fresh tomatoes. A recent trend is the sale of 'fresh-cut' fruit and vegetables - peeled potatoes, ready chopped carrots and bagged salads. One in five adults in the UK regularly buys fruit and vegetables in this form every week, according to market research firm Mintel. Surely this cutting and peeling speeds up the degradation of nutrients? 'There is a chance that ready prepared vegetables may have a lower content of some vitamins,' says Judy Buttriss, of the British Nutrition Foundation in London. 'But if their availability means that such vegetables are consumed in greater quantities, then the net effect is beneficial.'

E The bottom line is that although aspects of today's food production, processing and storage might make what we eat a bit less nutritious, they are also making foods more available - and this is far more important. 'The most important thing you can do is eat more fruits, vegetables and wholegrains, and cut down on highly refined, processed foods, vegetable oils and added sugars,' says Davis. He believes this will make a far greater difference to us than worrying about growing methods and transportation.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Looking for Inspiration

Helen Phillips asks what makes one person more creative than another.

People have speculated about their own creativity for centuries - perhaps ever since we became able to think about thinking. Whatever creativity, it is thinking that results in new ideas and new ways of doing things. The only bit of the creative process we actually know about is the moment of insight, yet creative ideas and projects may incubate beyond our awareness for months. Not surprising, then, that creativity has long eluded scientific study.

In the early 1970s, it was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general, having beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity.

Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, the creative personality tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. 'Creatives' have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive, when it comes to realising their ambitions.

But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist and author Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University, who herself has bipolar disorder, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a switch of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself.

Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, has carried out work that suggests that the brains of creative people are more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of data into our brains, which have to block most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ, can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more ideas.

But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record the pattern of brain waves as people made up stories. Creativity, he showed, has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterized at very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, which is the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of dreaming or rest. This could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative.

However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the two stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. 'It's as if the less creative person can't move up a gear,' says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. 'Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.'

Researchers are now trying to identify some of the specific anatomy of creativity. Brain studies of people with particular types of creativity show, perhaps not surprisingly, that active areas are determined by the specialist knowledge being used. Imagery, spatial awareness, language and so on - whatever the skill, it is localised to some extent to a particular brain part or parts. But it's not just these speciality areas that are active. Using information creatively needs coordination. 'Creative synthesis requires a new pattern, to put the brain in a state where many areas are simultaneously active,' says Claxton. When we concentrate in a less creative way, such as when reading the gas bill, there are fewer active centres and less synthesis.

But to be truly creative needs more than just the right personality and the right brain areas and networks. It's about using them effectively. Skills, situations and our social setting can shape our creativity just as dramatically as the brain resources we are born with. The most creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and the holidays to help alter focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk, then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them.

Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a 'creative', she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn't think they are completely mad!