Ejercicio B3 · Inglés PAU Valencia Extraordinaria 2024

TEXT B/TEXTO B

“GENDER INEQUITIES ARE IMPORTANT”: WHY COUPLES FALL OUT OF LOVE

A new study unpicks the reasons men and women call time on a relationship and finds that grievances really do matter. “The desire to get married is a primal instinct in women,” observed the late, great Nora Ephron. “It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.” Relationship wisdom is full of generalisations but, according to a recent study, women do appear to fall in and out of love more extremely than men.

Saurabh Bhargava of Carnegie Mellon University has published a new study in Psychological Science which has a number of striking findings. The first is that women reported having feelings of love almost twice as frequently as men. The second is that, over the course of a long relationship, women on average experience a much steeper decline in these feelings compared to their male partners.

Joanna Harrison is a former divorce lawyer who, having decided she wanted to help relationships before they broke down, became a couple’s counsellor. She is also the author of Five Arguments All Couples (Need to) Have, which bears the imperishable subtitle: and why the washing up matters.

Harrison points to “a brilliant” study entitled: “Gender Inequities in Household Labour Predict Lower Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men.” The study claims to “show that gender inequities are important contributors to low desire in women partnered with men.” It seems that if men want more action in the bedroom, they need to be more active in the kitchen.

Adapted from an article by Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, 13-01-2024.

Part I. Reading Comprehension

B3. Find a synonym for each of the four words below from these six options. All words are underlined in the text.

(1 point: 0.25 each)

primal

study

striking

decline

imperishable

active

a.

extraordinary

b.

reduction

c.

basic

d.

research