With regular money now coming in from the Guardian column, my regular contributions to other publications and the modest subscription revenue from The Friday Thing, I had been living something of the high life since arriving in London. I had started hanging out with the great and the good of the dot com world: attending launch parties for new sites, going to parties to celebrate them staying in business for a whole year, eating their lunches, drinking their booze and learning their secrets while they tried to convince me to write about them in my column. Many of these online entrepreneurs had become my friends and I'd managed to find myself a new girlfriend - Maggie, a Welsh journalist who was a restaurant reviewer for a food and drink website. This was a brilliant blag: it meant we could eat at some of London's best restaurants and never pay a penny. Life was wonderful: The Friday Thing and the Guardian column meant that my plan to use the Internet to become hugely famous and successful was firmly on track, I'd made lots of new friends, and, on top of all that, I was getting laid and eating gourmet food for free. Even Sam Lewis was jealous, and he was rich. Meanwhile, the people I was writing about were not having such an easy time of it. 2003 was a really strange time to be covering the 'new media' industry - mainly because no one was really sure for how long there would be an industry left to cover. The dot com boom of 1999 seemed like a millennium ago: a period in history as crazy as the tulip craze or the South Sea Bubble look to us now. The first signs of trouble for the industry had come in 2000. As the century turned, so had the market and - to use the parlance of analysts - the boom had turned out to be a bubble. And then the bubble had burst. Question: Who was jealous and rich in the story? Options: A. Maggie B. not enough information C. Sam Lewis D. The main character === The correct answer is
C

I really struggle to feel bad for people who actively choose to be miserable and manipulative. I'm dorky and like to use little proverbs all the time. One of my favorites is this: "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." At the end of the day, if someone has a problem, they can never resolve it if they don't truly wish to. You can give someone all the resources in the world, but you can't force them to utilize them. When I was 16, I dated a horrible guy. He was abusive verbally, emotionally, and sexually. He was an incredibly troubled young man and refused to seek help for his severe mental health issues. I eventually came to understand that he reveled in his misery. It was his identity. He acted like he wanted a cure and I'd set him up with resources, but he refused every single one. He may have struggled with serious mental illnesses, but being miserable perversely made him happy and he loved to use his struggles to justify his inexcusable behavior. He wanted to drag as many people into his fiery pit of anguish as possible. I later suffered from severe depression myself, and I never once used it as an excuse to hurt other people. My ex wasn't struggling with his mental health in terms of deliberating and carefully harming others. He was simply exhibiting a personality trait, one he chose to cultivate and it wasn't my problem. I ended up cutting him off completely in spite of all the threats. I will never feel bad for the awful plight he refuses to help himself out of. I have no patience for that type of person. Know what we call them? Toxic. Poison. A waste of time. Question: The author dated the troubled young man because: Options: A. She was a dork and no one else would date her. B. She felt her love could help him C. not enough information D. She loved hopeless causes === The correct answer is
B

In this confessional age, TV, radio and print rely for much of their content on the sad stories of those 'victims' of life. The story goes something like this: There is the future 'victim' getting on with their quotidian activities and whoosh, they are whisked into a life of gambling, drugs, sex or junk food addiction. After years of struggle, they finally find redemption and become good people again. As in any good tale of redemption, there has to be a 'reason' for why our 'victim' fell off the rails. Take your pick: they were molested, their parents ran away from home, they were denied desserts except on Sundays. Just thinking about it brings a tear to my stony face. How can you not be moved by tales such as these. What is the precipitating cause of the misery in my life? Well, my mother was French and my father was English. And to make things worse, I was brought up Catholic! Yes folks, in today's shorthand of grievance, I'm a half-breed straddling Canada's great language divide and a religious bigot. My hometown was a mixture of French and English-speaking people and the results of their miscenagation. You could never tell by someone's last name who spoke your language (For instance, my good friend P. Arsenault spoke the Queen's English and my cousin Sean Doyle wouldn't have recognized an Oxford Dictionary if you shoved up his nose). As children, we were segregated by language; all the French-speaking kids went to one side of the school where they spoke French all the time. I was fortunate enough to be sent to the English side of the school and got to speak my native tongue. My parents decided my brother and sister wouldn't be quite so lucky. In an effort to bridge the great language divide, they both spent six years learning everything in French and mingling with the French people (My parents did this because it was the firm belief of all forward-thinking families that whatever road you took would be much smoother if you could speak both of Canada's official languages. As it turns out for my siblings and... Question: what religion was brought up Options: A. somenting atheo B. not enough information C. somenting Catholic D. somenting Muslim === The correct answer is
C