Fakultas Kesehatan Masyarakat
Universitas Indonesia
English for General Academic Purposes
Mid-term Test
Name: Hadiq Nur Wahid Arrifqi Student Number: 1906351360
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READING AND WRITING (25 points)
A. Write a summary (100-150 words) of the following text.
Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too
This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought
We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches
out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But
defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can
include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference.
There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of
emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his
book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada,
compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations.
‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious”
social situations,’ he suggests.
By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the
University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent,
calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one
running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom,
which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that
while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five
types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high
arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom:
someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it
remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom
each of us might be prone to.
Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All
emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that being
bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead
to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found
that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for
15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a
control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it
allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out
more boredom in our lives.
Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t convinced. ‘If you
are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition
boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he
adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us.
Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to
help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of
boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus
on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to
improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the
world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps
most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to state
where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.
Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but
they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been
linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer
particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high
boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies
of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer
prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself
cannot kill – it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do
to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with
teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that
it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by
using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.
Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might
even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of
overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking
yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to
motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.
Summary
The article “Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too” examines the use
of being bored. The author first explain that it is impossible to keep everyone mind to
anything. Then, he show that there are five distinc types of boredom, they are indifferent,
calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. By the Sandi Mann statement, the author
says that being bored makes someone more creative. From Eastwood statement, the
author also said that boredom is an undesirable state and linked with a variety of traits. In
conclusion, the author suggest the reader to give the mean for boredom to be motivated
and be creative.
II. WRITING (25 points)
Write an essay consisting of four or five paragraphs about one of the following topics. Your
essay should have an introductory paragraph containing a thesis statement, two or three
body paragraphs, each containing a topic sentence and supporting details, and a
concluding paragraph.
1. Will humanity reach the time when there will be no more technological
advancement?
2. Exercise is the important in our lives to stay healthy and there are many ways to
exercise. In your opinion, is doing sport the best way to keep fit? Why/ why not?
3. Should mobile phones be banned in the classroom?
4. Zoos are educational, but it is often said that keeping animals in the zoo is against
the law of nature. Explain the pros and cons of keeping animals at the zoo.
5. What are the effects of cross-cultural marriages to racial tolerance?
6. It is said that a person can never understand the culture of a country unless they
speak the language. To what extent do you agree with the statement? Use fact and
evidence to support your argument.
Why Sport is Important to do
Everyone who have understood the important of be healthy will try to keep
themeselves fit. However, everyone must doing exercise regulary. If people don't doing
exercise regulary, their body will not evolve. Being one of helath care activities, sport can
be the best way to keep the body fit.
Sports are required to keep the people health and reduce risk of certain types of
cancer and some health problems. Throughout history, people can't give up their interest
at their body. There are many people love themselves no matter how beautiful or ugly
they are. Naturally, people's first aim should be healthy and fit with the benefits of sports.
Lowers risk of certain types of cancer. In addition, people who exercise regularly are less
likely to develop breast, colon, and lung cancer.
And then, sport can also provide benefits for mental health and needed to enjoy.
Sport is good for mental health too, as it can battle feelings of anxiety and depression,
sharpen focus, and improve self esteem. If there is a sport activity when people are
unhappy, they will probably be motivated and be refreshed again after the sport activity.
Sports become the best way to keep fit because sport can provide benefits for
physical and mental health. Besides there are many ways of sport that can be done, sports
also do not require a lot of time and money. That way, sport becomes a popular activity
for many people.
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