Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the questions.

As Australia and other countries debate the merits of banning kids under 14 from social media, Meta has announced a significant “reimagining” of teenagers’ experience of Instagram. These new “Teen Accounts” will be set to private by default, have the maximum content and messaging restrictions possible, pause notifications at night, and add new ways for teens to indicate their content preferences. Importantly, for kids under the age of 16, changing these default settings will now require parental permission.

Teen Accounts are a combination of new features and a repackaging of a number of tools that have already been in place, but haven’t had the visibility or uptake Meta would have preferred. Bringing these incremental changes together under the umbrella of Teen Accounts should make these changes more visible to teens and caregivers.

In promoting Teen Accounts, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri emphasised the change is aimed at giving parents “peace of mind”. It doesn’t require explicit intervention from parents for these changes to occur. “I’m a dad, and this is a significant change to Instagram and one that I’m personally very proud of,” noted Mosseri. This is part of a longer-term strategy of positioning Mosseri as a prominent parental voice to increase his perceived credibility in this domain. Parents or guardians will need to use their own accounts for “supervision” if they want to know what teens are doing on Instagram, or have access to more granular controls. These include setting personalised time limits, seeing an overview of a teen’s activity, or allowing any of the default settings to change. The real opportunity for parents here is to take these changes as a chance to discuss with their children how they’re using Instagram and other social media platforms.

Teen Accounts are launching in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States this week, taking up to 60 days to reach all users in those countries. Users in the rest of the world are scheduled to get Teen Accounts in January 2025. For a long time, Instagram hasn’t done enough to look after the interests of younger users. Child rights advocates have mostly endorsed Teen Accounts as a significant positive change in young people’s experiences and safety on Instagram. Teen Accounts are clearly a meaningful step in the right direction, but it’s worth remembering it took Instagram 14 years to get to this point. That’s too long. Ultimately, these changes should serve as a prompt for any platform open to kids or teens to ensure they provide age-appropriate experiences. Young users can gain a lot from being online, but we must minimise the risks.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the questions.

A decade ago, scientists would say they were pretty sure a specific hurricane, heatwave, flood, drought or raging wildfire was more severe due to climate change, but they could rarely pinpoint its exact contribution. Now, thanks to a convergence of human brainpower, mathematical models, precise weather data, and superpower computers, climate fingerprints are being calculated for many major weather events. The purpose of this climate attribution is to drive home the extent that greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuel relates to the weather effects people are seeing. “We want everyone to understand how what we as humans have done translates into the intensities and frequencies of extreme events,” says Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist at the London-based nonprofit World Weather Attribution (WWA), a leader in this research.

Complex weather events are triggered by several environmental factors, including high- or low-pressure systems, jet streams, and more. But it’s long been known that warmer air and ocean surface temperatures are additional important contributors that have worsened many recent disasters. Scientists have calculated, for example, that total rainfall from six of the major hurricanes that struck the Atlantic coast in the past 20 years—Katrina, Irma, Maria, Harvey, Dorian, and Florence—and which collectively caused more than $500 billion in damage, were four to 15 times more intense (depending on the hurricane) than they would have been had the Earth been cooler.

On average, heatwaves that would have happened once in 10 years in pre-industrial times now occur some three times more often, and they’re frequently 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than in the past, WWA says. The record-smashing heatwave that buckled roads in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in the summer of 2021 would have been all but impossible without the contribution of climate change. Could your own home have been saved? Scientists now aim to calculate and disseminate these climate fingerprints within days or a few weeks of an extreme weather event, when people are paying close attention, says Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist who calculates attributions at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Attribution science relies on climate models showing the impacts of greenhouse gases on the planet, which are then combined with current weather information gleaned from ground stations and weather satellites, historical information from global datasets, and other inputs. Statistical techniques culled from epidemiology are also used, since that field also teases apart the relative contributions of various factors, such as how much smoking habits, family history, and obesity each contribute to a population’s heart disease odds. Heatwaves are simpler to calculate than hurricanes, and droughts are the toughest of all, Kimutai says.

Complete the text below with the correct form of the words in capitals.

The Miss Universe pageant has been a pillar of pop culture in the United States for decades—whether it be the (28) ____________ outfits, a sense of nationalism, or Steve Harvey iconically crowning the wrong winner on live television in 2015—the competition has kept millions of viewers captivated for decades. (29) ____________ founded by Catalina Swimwear in 1952 as a marketing stunt after a Miss America winner refused to model their swimwear, the Miss Universe pageant has grown from an untelevised beauty pageant of thirty women to an (30) ____________ broadcast featuring eighty women from across the globe. Despite the Miss Universe pageant’s efforts to make the event more than a “beauty” pageant and appeal to modern feminism—especially with the recent (31) ____________ of leadership by transgender activist Anne Jakkaphong Jarajutatip—many still protest the pageant’s perpetuation of unrealistic beauty standards and its objectification of women. While these concerns are valid and the whole concept of a beauty pageant is
(32) ____________, the Miss Universe pageant has historically functioned as a mechanism for women in developing states to attain a political platform and a voice on the world stage.