Complete each of the sentences with the appropriate word/phrase from the box. Make changes if necessary.

Patient zero, zoonotic, antivaxxer, diagnosis, transmit, variant, lockdown, quarantine, crown, negative
1. The name “corona” comes from the virus’s appearance as a __________.
2. __________ refers to an official restriction of movement within or access to an area in the interests of public
health
3. __________ describes isolation and monitoring of people who seem healthy but may have been exposed to
an infectious disease to see if they develop symptoms.

4. Authorities usually try to determine who __________ was in any given outbreak as can help answer im-
portant questions about how, when and why it started.

5. The President is pleased to announce that he has tested __________ for the virus.
6. Some __________ are against vaccines on religious grounds and others just believe vaccines are dangerous
to health.
7. The World Health Organization (WHO) regards Delta as “the fastest and fittest” __________ so far.
8. To protect yourself from __________ diseases it is best to avoid bites and scratches from animals.
9. Many diseases are __________ through physical contact.
10. If you're not happy with the doctor's __________ you could always get a second opinion.

Is ‘Lettuce Water’ Really the Sleep Aid of Your

Dreams?
A TikTok trend says so, but experts aren’t so sure.

In a TikTok video from May, a 21-year-old woman in London shoves a clump of lettuce leaves into a
Superman mug, steeps them in hot water (with a peppermint tea bag, for taste) and drinks it. “Update, I
do feel slightly drowsy,” she records herself saying from a reclined position later on. “Another update,
lettuce has crack because your sis is gone,” she adds again, looking like she’s on the verge of falling
asleep.

The #lettucewater hashtag on TikTok has spawned hundreds of videos and garnered more than 31
million views, as many people — some bored and curious, some desperate for a sleep hack — try the
trend. An influencer in Washington State says she can barely keep her eyes open an hour after drinking
the concoction. A man in Ontario says the same, claiming that a cup of “lettuce water” allowed him to
sleep for nine hours straight.

Proponents on social media concur that steeping a handful of lettuce leaves for several minutes in
boiling water, then drinking the liquid, can help you fall asleep faster — and stay asleep longer. But
doctors and sleep experts say these claims are unsubstantiated.
“This is a pretty easy thing to try, it’s pretty harmless,” said Michelle Drerup, director of the behavioral
sleep medicine program at the Cleveland Clinic Sleep Disorders Center. “But unfortunately, it doesn’t
have any evidence or merit behind it.”

Can lettuce water actually help you sleep?

No studies have shown that eating (or steeping) lettuce you buy in the grocery store can help you fall
asleep, Dr. Drerup said. But it’s understandable why people think it might.

Lettuce has been used in folk medicine as a natural sedative and pain reliever for centuries. During the
19th century, for instance, some doctors used lactucarium — a dried, hardened form of a bitter, milky
juice secreted by wild lettuce — as a sedative, or combined lettuce with other ingredients (like opium
and hemlock, a poisonous flowering plant) to make dwale, an herbal anaesthetic.

Dr. Drerup said that the TikTok trend may have stemmed from a 2017 Korean study in mice, which she
has seen people cite in videos. In the study, researchers reported that after feeding young mice a
concentrated extract of lettuce seeds and leaves and pentobarbital (a sedative), some slept as much as
about 20 minutes longer than mice that were fed just the pentobarbital. But Dr. Drerup said that the
study had many limitations, including the fact that the lettuce extracts were tested alongside a sleep-
inducing drug. Not to mention, mice aren’t humans. “It doesn’t really support the hypothesis of the
lettuce water doing anything,” Dr. Drerup said.

There have been a handful of other animal and human studies — none on lettuce water itself — showing
an association between lettuce seed and its extracts and reduced symptoms of insomnia, including one
in pregnant women, but they don’t provide strong enough evidence to prove lettuce can help with sleep,
Dr. Drerup said. And even if there were a sedative component in conventional lettuce, boiling a few
leaves would not release enough extract to have an effect on you, she added. “You’d probably have to
have

There is some limited evidence that wild lettuce — a medicinal plant found growing in sunny spots
around the world and sometimes sold in tincture, powder, oil or pill form — has sedative and pain-
relieving effects. But keep in mind that ingesting it raw is toxic to humans, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge,
an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and the director of
the Sleep Center of Excellence at Columbia. “It is a sedative, but it’s not something you’d want to be
consuming in large doses,” she said, and wild lettuce is entirely different from the leaves people steep in
hot water on TikTok.
So why do so many people think lettuce water works?
“It comes down to that beautiful placebo effect,” Dr. Drerup said. If you’re convinced that drinking
lettuce water — or anything else — will help you sleep, you can be lulled into thinking the concoction
works. A 2018 meta-analysis of 13 studies found that people with insomnia symptoms who took a
placebo treatment they thought was a real sleep treatment reported better sleep than those who did not
receive any treatment.

“The mechanism for this is probably that once you do something that you believe will help you sleep
better, you stop trying,” said Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Sleep
Medicine and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at U.C.L.A. “And trying to
fall asleep is a great way to stay awake.”

Dr. Drerup also mentioned that building a consistent “wind down” routine has been shown to help with
sleep, so if a cup of boiled lettuce signals the end of the day to you, then your body and brain can start
preparing for a good snooze.
Can drinking lettuce water be harmful?

If you want to keep sipping lettuce water, boil away, Dr. Martin said. “Other than the fact that it
probably doesn’t taste very good,” the drink is unlikely to cause any negative health effects. The only
downside may be that chugging a lot of liquid before bed may mean more trips to the bathroom in the
middle of the night. Dr. Martin typically recommends that people stop drinking fluids about an hour
before they go to bed.

There are countless supposed “miracle cures” out there, Dr. Drerup said, but developing good habits for
improved sleep, like keeping bed times consistent, avoiding too much screen time at night and limiting
alcohol consumption, are better ways to set yourself up for a successful slumber.
Dr. Drerup said she’s not surprised, however, something like lettuce water has made its way across the
internet. “It highlights the extent to which people will try to find a quick solution to improve sleep,” she
said.

TASK 1: Do the following statements agree with the information given in

the Reading Passage?
In the spaces provided, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information.
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information.
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.
1. The 21-year-old woman added crack to the lettuce so that she could fall into
sleep more easily.
2. Due to the lack of sleep, many people participated in the trend.
3. A lot of people after trying the lettuce water could fall into sleep faster than
they usually did.
4. The evidence for drinking lettuce water for a better sleep is clear although
foundless.
5. Many didn’t find using lettuce water for better sleep meritorious at all.
TASK 2: Complete the summary below.
Choose TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

LETTUCE WATER IS REALLY A CURE FOR SLEEPLESSNESS?

Folk medicine has been using lettuce as a form of plant-based (6) ______. They were often

concocted with other ingredients to create an anaesthetic. In a study, pentobarbital with let-
tuce seeds and leaves was seen to get mice sleep relatively longer than pentobarbital per se.

However, it was not the case for the Tiktok trend because the lettuce extracts played second
fiddle to the (7) _______, let alone lettuce water, and there is no similarity between mice and
humans.
There are a number of studies proving the connection between the lettuce parts and better
sleep, but they were deemed too vague for lettuce to help human sleep tighter. Even when
lettuce had the (8) _______, a few leaves wouldn’t have much effect. A kind of (9) ________
wild lettuce, dissimilar to the normal one, is somehow proven to have pain-soothing effect.
Nonetheless, it is too toxic for human to take in.
TASK 3: Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
10. Why did the author mention the meta-analysis in 2018?
A. to give evidence why the placebo effect is so important in the trend
B. to provide examples for the impact of the placebo effect
C. to clarify the role of the placebo effect in the trend
D. to analyze the placebo effect’s influence on everyone’s mindset
11. Which statement is true when we talk about the mechanism of the placebo effect?
A. The more you try to sleep, the harder it gets you to do so.
B. If you continue to do repetitive activities before sleep, you will sleep tighter.
C. You will fall asleep no matter what if you do something you believe that will help you sleep better.
D. Unless you do something to signal calling it a day, you can’t fall into sleep easily.