For active people, regular training is as important part of maintaining and increasing fitness. About the only real downside to regular exercise is the transient toll it takes on the body after a hard training session. The pain and soreness after training needs sufficient time to recover from before another hard session can be performed. A very plausible theory pushed for many years is that the post-exercise oxidative stress in the body is the primary cause of the muscle damage and fatigue experienced. If you could reduce this oxidative stress, then it would allow quicker recovery, and then more time spent training. What this theory ignores though is that oxidative damage is a natural part of how the body adapts to stressful exercise, allowing the body to repair and grow stronger to allow higher levels of performance in the future. A small scale study has previously found that trained and untrained individuals who dose up on antioxidant supplements impair important exercise training adaptations such as improved insulin sensitivity and production of oxidative stress defence proteins. Now researchers have extended this study by looking at the effect of antioxidants in trained female runners, and published their findings in the European Journal of Sports Science. Twenty-three well trained female runners took part in three separate 3-week training blocks where they took either 1 gram of vitamin C, blackcurrant juice, or a placebo drink for each of the training blocks. Each of the dietary interventions involved drinking a similar volume of fruit drink of a total of half a litre per day split over the morning and evening. The training performance of each runner was carefully measured at the beginning and end of each 3-week treatment period. The runners stuck to a set training schedule which allowed a more accurate assessment of any changes in performance over the training period. What do many people think causes muscle damage and fatigue in the body?  A. eating too many carbs before a run  B. post-exercise oxidative stress  C. not enough information  D. eating too much fat before a run
B
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I had something that might have been a little supernatural. So I was trying to sleep one time, and I sleep under the blankets 99% of the time. I sleep downstairs, so hearing noise is pretty normal. Also, my door doesn’t lock, or even latch the door handle, so you can just push it open. So I was laying down, maybe at 60% in terms of how close I was to falling asleep, so I just had to lay down for like 5 more minutes. But there are a lot of noises, and they freak me out even though I just sorta pretend that they’re definitely a cat or my dog or something. So, I’m already slightly spooked, but I’m ignoring it and going to sleep anyway. But then, I hear my door open. That isn’t too weird, I do have cats, so even though by this point my fear is intense, I just sorta blow it off and keep trying to sleep. And then, something that’s never happened in a situation like this, I feel something moving towards me on my bed. It feels like a cats movements, with light feet making slight reverberations on the bed. So my fear goes away entirely, and I’m like “Oh okay, it’s just the cat, that’s good.” And I lift my blankets off my head to let my cat under with me, and because the fear seemed to make the atmosphere under there very hot and tense, and then I look at my bed and there’s nothing. So I just pretend nothing happened and go to sleep, but that still sticks with me and even though it’s kinda underwhelming I still think it was very strange since I wasn’t at the “edge of consciousness” stage of going to sleep, so I feel like the chances I imagined it aren’t too high. The author lifted the covers for the cat:  A. When the door opened  B. When they felt something walking on the bed.  C. When they first heard the noise they thought was a cat.  D. not enough information
B
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Patch's mother was named Silver, because high summer sun made her fur shine that colour. She had a marvellous drey high up a spruce tree, carved out long ago by a woodpecker, and since extended into a two-chambered home full of bright things. The journey along the sky-road to her drey did not take long. When Patch looked inside, he saw a hundred colours glittering in the sunlight, shining from bits of metal and glass set into Silver's walls and floor. But his mother was not there. He could tell by the faintness of her smell that no squirrel had been here in some time. There were two faint traces of scent, several days old; that of Silver, and that of another squirrel, a musky scent that Patch did not recognize. A scent that made his tail stiffen as if danger was near. Patch stared into his mother's empty drey for a moment. It wasn't normal for a squirrel to abandon her drey for days, not in the middle of winter. And he hadn't seen Silver for three days. Not since all the acorns had disappeared from the earth. Patch ran back to his own tree, and then to the maple tree next door, to his brother Tuft's drey. He ran very fast. He was hungrier than ever, and he was beginning to be very worried. He was relieved when he looked into Tuft's drey and found it occupied. Tuft himself was not present, but Brighteyes was, and their babies, and it was clear from the smells that Tuft had only just departed. "Hello, Patch," Brighteyes said weakly. "Would you like to come in?" Patch entered. Brighteyes was curled up with her babies in the drey's deepest, warmest corner. The last time Patch had visited, a week ago, this had been a den of noise and chaos, with all Brighteyes' four babies running and jumping and playfighting. Today they lay weakly beside Brighteyes, and the once-shining eyes from which their mother had taken her name were dim and clouded. Why are Brighteyes' babies weak?  A. They are sick.  B. not enough information  C. They are dying.  D. They have been poisoned.
A
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"They've got cameras everywhere, man. Not just in supermarkets and departments stores, they're also on your cell phones and your computers at home. And they never turn off. You think they do, but they don't. "They're always on, always watching you, sending them a continuous feed of your every move over satellite broadband connection. "They watch you fuck, they watch you shit, they watch when you pick your nose at the stop light or when you chew out the clerk at 7-11 over nothing or when you walk past the lady collecting for the women's shelter and you don't put anything in her jar. "They're even watching us right now," the hobo added and extended a grimy, gnarled digit to the small black orbs mounted at either end of the train car. There were some days when I loved taking public transportation, and other days when I didn't. On a good day, I liked to sit back and watch the show, study the rest of the passengers, read into their little ticks and mannerisms and body language, and try to guess at their back stories, giving them names and identities in my head. It was fun in a voyeuristic kind of way. And luckily, today was a good day. I watched the old Vietnamese woman with the cluster of plastic shopping bags gripped tightly in her hand like a cloud of tiny white bubbles. My eyes traced the deep lines grooving her face, and I wondered about the life that led her to this place. I watched the lonely businessman staring longingly across the aisle at the beautiful Mexican girl in the tight jeans standing with her back to him. He fidgeted with the gold band on his finger, and I couldn't tell if he was using it to remind himself of his commitment or if he was debating whether he should slyly slip it off and talk to her. Immediately after the end of this text, the Vietnamese woman is:  A. gone  B. not enough information  C. holding plastic shopping bags  D. watching the author

A
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