OPTION A — READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS 1 TO 5.

COVID HAS BROUGHT OUT THE WORST IN CUSTOMERS

Waitressing can be a difficult job at the best of times. I fondly remember one weekend brunch shift when a woman criticized me because we only had white sugar for her coffee, not brown; she insisted that this was a breach of "etiquette".

I took the job last summer as a way to make ends meet while I started a new life in Manchester after moving from London. Then Covid hit. We endured the closure of the restaurant due to (line 5) lockdown, but from July onwards it was a relief to be able to keep the place open. All we asked of customers was to register with the Covid app, wear a mask when they entered the indoor area and stay seated as we provided table service.

Yet since customers have started to stream back through our doors, I have been faced with a different reality. When I greet them and ask them to scan the test-and-trace app barcode, many will ignore (line 10) me or say they don't have their mobile phones with them, only to sit down and put their phones on the table.

Then there's making sure people are wearing their masks to keep each other and staff like me safe. You'd think we were taking away people's right to vote by asking them to pop a piece of cloth over their face while they nip to the toilet. All of this would be bad enough, but to make things worse, (line 15) management have decided that the maxim "the customer is always right" endures.

When you get everyone seated, then comes the shouting across the room to get your attention. I've cried in work more than once because of the way a customer has treated me.

We all want to get back to normal, but this situation has truly brought out the worst in people. If you plan to go out this week, please remember to be polite to your waiting staff: they're living through exactly (line 20) the same pandemic as you.

The writer is a waitress in Manchester. (Fragment adapted from The Guardian.)

OPTION B — READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS 1 TO 5.

CAN EXERCISE MAKE YOU MORE CREATIVE?

If you often exercise, there's a good chance you also tend to be more creative, according to an interesting new study of the links between physical activity and imagination. It finds that active people come up with more and better ideas during tests of their inventiveness than people who are relatively sedentary. Science already offers plenty of evidence that physical activity influences how we think. Many studies show that our brains change in response to physical activity, in part because during exercise we (line 5) marinate our brains with extra blood, oxygen and nutrients.

Creativity is one of the most abstract of thinking skills and difficult to quantify, and its relationship with exercise has not been clear. A 2.014 study of exercise and creativity likewise found that moving can spur innovation. But this and most other past studies of movement and creativity looked into the short-term effects of physical activity under tightly controlled conditions in labs or similar settings. They did (line 10) not examine the potential linkages, if any, between everyday activities, like going for a walk, and the workings of our imaginations, or how being active could possibly affect creativity in the first place.

The scientists wondered, too, about happiness. Some past research had speculated that good moods might be the intermediary linking activity and creativity. According to that idea, moving makes people happier, but, the researchers wondered, did being happy relate closely both to how much people (line 15) moved and their creativity, meaning it linked the two?

The answer, the researchers concluded, was no. The most active of the volunteers proved to be also the most creative, and active people also tended to be happy people, although their moods were highest if they engaged in relatively vigorous activities, like jogging or playing sports, rather than moderate ones. But the correlations between activity, creativity and moods were slight. People could walk (line 20) often and be quite creative but not especially happy, suggesting that it was not improved moods that most influenced creativity. It was moving.

The study does not explain how exercise and other activities might shape creativity, but it implies that active imaginations start with active lives. (line 25) (Fragment adapted from The New York Times.)