THE AUTHOR WROTE THIS ARTICLE MOSTLY TO ___________.A. SHOW THAT M...

34. The author wrote this article mostly to ___________.

A. show that mental health is more important than physical health

B. tell people which foods are and are not healthy

C. tell people about the key parts of a balanced lifestyle

D. make sure everyone gets enough exercise in their lives

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate

the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42.

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close

friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the

nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to

collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face

contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

"Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number

of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," said Will Reader at

Sheffield Hallam University. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace

have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard

University members but has since expanded to over 34m users worldwide. MySpace, which

was set up in 2003, has over 200m users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News

Corporation in 2005 for $580m.

Previous research has suggested that a person's conventional friendship group consists of

around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in

touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is

determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. But Dr.

Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this

figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking,

asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends

and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact

with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have

around 5 close friends. Also, 90% of contacts that the subjects regarded as close friends were

people they had met face to face. "People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative

in forming close friendships," added Dr. Reader. He told the British Association Festival of

Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding

acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. "What social network sites can do is

decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post

information to multiple people," he said.

But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy. "We invest

time and effort in them in the hope that sometime they will help us out. It is a kind of reciprocal

relationship," said Dr. Reader, "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really

going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them...It's very easy to be

deceptive on the internet."