ELF-övning inför högskoleprovet – engelsk läsförståelse

For most of the late twentieth century, the sleeper train looked like a relic. Cheap flights could carry a passenger from one European capital to another in two hours, and rail operators, faced with ageing carriages and half-empty compartments, quietly cancelled one overnight route after another. By the early 2010s, a traveller hoping to fall asleep in one country and wake up in another had remarkably few options.

The revival that followed was not driven by nostalgia, though nostalgia certainly helped sell tickets. It was driven by arithmetic. A night train does something no aircraft can: it turns travel time into sleeping time. A ten-hour journey that departs at nine in the evening costs the passenger almost nothing in working hours, and it also saves the price of a hotel room. Seen this way, the slow train is not competing with the two-hour flight but with the whole day that a short trip by air tends to consume: the journey to the airport, the security queue, the transfer into the city at the other end.

Concern about the climate added a second argument. Rail travel produces only a fraction of the emissions of flying, and a growing number of travellers, especially younger ones, began to treat the choice of transport as a moral question rather than a purely practical one. Operators were quick to notice. Advertising that once emphasised comfort started to emphasise conscience.

Yet the economics remain fragile. A sleeper carriage carries far fewer passengers than a day coach of the same length, since beds take up more space than seats, and it spends most of the daytime standing idle in a depot. Track charges, which vary greatly between countries, can make a single international route profitable on one side of a border and loss-making on the other. Several of the routes launched with great publicity have already been cut back to a few departures a week.

None of this means the night train is doomed. It does mean that its future depends less on how travellers feel about it than on decisions made far from the platform: how governments price the use of their railways, and whether they are willing to treat a cross-border sleeper service as shared infrastructure rather than as a commercial product that must pay its own way.

Urban foxes are now a familiar sight in many European cities. Their success is often explained by the amount of food that humans leave behind, 1 researchers point out that foxes are also remarkably flexible in their behaviour. In the countryside, a fox may hunt over a large territory; in a city, the same animal can survive on a few streets, 2 its routine to rubbish collection days and the opening hours of takeaway restaurants.

This flexibility has a cost, however. City foxes tend to be bolder than their rural relatives, which makes them more likely to come into conflict with residents. 3, most complaints concern noise and scattered rubbish rather than any real danger.

From 1 March, the reading room on the second floor will be reserved for silent study between 9 am and 1 pm. Group work is still welcome in the seminar rooms, which can now be booked online up to two weeks in advance rather than one. Laptops may be used throughout the building, but we ask that phone calls be taken in the entrance hall.

Your article on four-day working weeks presented the idea as if it were simply a gift to employees. In my own workplace, the shorter week came with the expectation that we would complete the same amount of work in less time. Some colleagues welcomed the extra day off; others found the remaining four days so intense that they spent the fifth one recovering. I am not against the idea, but I wish your reporter had asked more of us how it actually feels.

It is often said that we use only ten per cent of our brains. The claim has proved remarkably durable, appearing in advertisements and films, but it has no basis in neuroscience. Brain scans show activity across virtually all regions over the course of a day, and damage to almost any area produces some loss of function. If ninety per cent of the brain were idle, such injuries would often go unnoticed.