You'd have to be on disability to not understand the sort of questions like this. Those disability numbers, especially from covid, should be available.
“Crackers seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 9 percent.” The sample “low difficulty” question asks, “At what moisture level do crackers become soft?”
Crackers also seem soft when their moisture level reaches about 5 percent.
What moisture level do crackers become soft?
I'm sorry, 5 percent isn't the correct answer; they actually get soft earlier than then.
This seems like one of those questions like "what's the difference between an abstract class and an interface in Java" where you're looking what the expected answer is as opposed to the actual answer. (w.r.t. Java; the answer they're looking for is that you can define a default method in an abstract class. It doesn't matter how long ago you could do that in an interface ...)
What you are missing is the part about following directions. The literacy tests will instruct you to use the provided information to answer the questions. It doesn't matter if the information is incorrect. In fact, it may be beneficial to have incorrect information to eliminate people using preexisting knowledge vs comprehending the provided text.
I guess you’d fail the reading comprehension part then. All the required info is in the question. You can’t just pull 5% from nowhere. There is an assertion that it’s 9%, the task is to identify and repeat the asserted value, not make up your own.
“Seems” here being “you experience it as soft” since soft isn’t an absolute thing. Since there are no other mentions of percentages that are soft there isn’t really anything else to mix it up with.
That line of thinking breaks down in the real world though.
Its like when some scientist reports they killed 70% of cancer cells in the lab and a news report comes out with scientists develop treatment for 70% of cancer.
You cannot just take "scientist reports they killed 70% of cancer cells in the lab" and then follow-up with a question of "what percent of cancer did the scientist cure?" and then use the only percentage you saw ("70%") as the answer. The information given wasn't not sufficient to answer the question asked; in a test scenario, sure make an assumption but in the real world just get clarification ...
I mean it's not though. The question is about "is soft" not "seems soft".
These slight of hands are pretty crucial to actually reading in the real world (or conversely, deceiving people).
It's like if you read a press release about how X is 120% better than Y. Judging from the press release, X is clearly better than Y but then if you actually do your own research you find for your workload X is actually 10% worse than Y.
The article also pointed out that similar things are apparent in many other countries. Finland was highlighted as a place that avoided the trend -- a country that also had relatively low covid impact compared to the US.
I mean, not really; John's Hopkins puts Finland's all time test positivity per capita at ~26%, to the United States' ~30%. A bit better, but not enough to explain differences like this. Its not vaccination either: Finland only leads the US by ~0.23%.
One area where Finland had low impact is in deaths: 0.16% per capita to the US's 0.33%. But, if the theory is that COVID infections themselves caused a globally observable effect like this, that stat should cause the problem to hit Finland more, not less, given they had more COVID survivors than the US.
I think the better explanation might be COVID adjacent: COVID seems to have some direct neurological impact, but the lingering secondary cultural, economic, and psychological effects of the pandemic & lockdown feel a lot more likely to explain this. Additionally, I'd put money on social media also being higher on the sources list than direct COVID neurological impact.
I wonder about this regularly and think back to discussions on this topic back in 2020-2021. Are there more recent studies or research on this topic you'd recommend?
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/12/do-adults-have-...