Задание 10 на тексты и заголовки

A) Do you remember the old days? The time buying a pair of jeans or a mobile phone involved choosing between two or three options. Now, pop into a shop on the high street and you’ll find about 50 different styles of jeans and literally hundreds of mobile phones. But is it better? We try to answer this question.

B) We’ve never had so much choice. Take supermarkets, for example. A local store could offer you 38 types of milk, 107 varieties of pasta, over 170 types of salad dressing and 154 flavors of jam. The average supermarket offers more than 30 000 products with thousands more being added each year. In the words of one shopper, it’s so overwhelming that it just makes you feel awful. If you carefully considered every aspect — ethics, food miles, price, flavor and ingredients — you’d never get round to buying anything, ever.

C) But it isn’t just about food. For every aspect of life there’s an incredible range of products and services on offer — from clothes and gadgets to educational and financial services, not forgetting holidays and entertainment. Access to the Internet has, of course, widened this choice. It does not only offer the products themselves but detailed reviews of product ranges with comparisons of style, price and reliability. These are intended to make our lives easier but in reality just lead to information overload.

D) It now seems that all this choice isn’t good for us. Professor Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice, says ‘There is vastly too much choice in the modern world and we are paying an enormous price for it. It makes us feel helpless, mentally paralysed and profoundly dissatisfied.’ But shouldn’t we be happy to have all this information and choice? Why is it a problem to have 275 types of breakfast cereal or 10 500 000 hits to an Internet search for ‘holidays in Spain’?

E) The bigger the range of products available, the less satisfied we are with our choice. We imagine that the perfect mobile or jeans must exist in such a big number of products and that we might have chosen the wrong thing. Or that by choosing a particular service or form of entertainment, we might have missed out on something better.

F) Experiments seem to indicate that less choice is better. A team of researchers at Stanford University in the USA ran a test on consumers choosing jam. Those who tested just six jams felt happier and bought more products than consumers who had 24 jams to taste. Another experiment showed that students who were given a smaller range of essay topics produced better works.

G) So what can we do? One technique is simply to choose smaller shops with fewer products. And Professor Schwartz advises, ‘Choose when to choose… Don’t worry about what type of mobile phone package to opt for. Pick a sofa from IKEA in 30 seconds and you’ll feel better than if you spen hours researching sofas — because you won’t know what else you’re missing out on.’

A) – 5
B) – 8
C) – 6
D) – 1
E) – 4
F) – 7
G) – 2