NO MORE INVISIBLE ALLEYS A twilight market for safer homes ▪ From Pressure to Plans: In Old Market Ward, rapid...

Gen Z & the Housing Squeeze: Talk Before It’s Too Late

Why come?

Flat prices keep (7) __________ while starting salaries remain low. For many young workers, buying a first home without family support is no longer realistic.

What is changing?

For many young workers, monthly rent (8) __________ an arm and a leg. Some Gen Z workers delay marriage, share small rooms, or move back to the countryside. (9) __________ rising housing costs, others migrate to cheaper regions to seek better opportunities.

What can we discuss?

Our youth centre will host a short public talk on affordable housing, saving plans and safe renting. The talk will include legal advice and mental-health support, (10) __________ it?

Join us to understand the housing (11) __________ and suggest fairer residential policies for a more stable (12) __________.

Question 7: A. going up        B. settling in        C. bringing back        D. getting around

Question 8: A. pays        B. spends        C. costs        D. charges

Question 9: A. Beyond the reach of        B. Under the pressure of        

 C. At the cost of                D. Within the range of

Question 10: A. won’t        B. don’t        C. may not        D. shan’t

Question 11: A. comfort        B. shortage        C. apology        D. exhibition

Question 12: A. coastal        B. agricultural        C. colonial        D. community

Question 13:

a. Ryan: Charging by bag sounds fair, but families in smaller flats may have nowhere to store sorted waste safely.

b. Chloe: Our apartment block will test QR-coded rubbish bags next month to reduce overflowing bins in the crowded basement.

c. Chloe: True, so the trial should include extra collection days before calling careless residents the problem.

A. c – a – b        B. a – b – c        C. b – a – c        D. b – c – a

Question 14:

a. Emily: Are they mainly worried about noise, or do they think the stalls will block the pavement?

b. Emily: That could protect sleep without killing extra employment, the balance the city keeps missing.

c. Emily: The empty land under the metro line may become a night market for young traders.

d. Jake: A closing time and a clear walking lane might help; the trader group also offered to collect litter.

e. Jake: It sounds lively, but residents above the station already complain about motorbikes and late music.

A. a – e – c – d – b        B. c – d – a – e – b        C. b – e – a – d – c        D. c – e – a – d – b

Question 15:

Dear CityLink Passengers,

We hope your week is going well.

a. Passengers requested it because Eastfield has grown rapidly, while the nearest tram stop remains far away.

b. To handle that concern, senior and student fares will stay, and paper tickets remain available at the community office.

c. We will review complaints and travel data before deciding whether the route should become permanent.

d. From early June, our team will test a low-emission shuttle between Eastfield flats and Central Station each busy morning.

e. Some residents, however, worry that QR-only payment may exclude older passengers and increase daily expenses.

Thank you for sharing your views.

Best,

CityLink Customer Team

A. d – a – e – b – c        B. d – e – a – b – c        C. a – d – e – b – c        D. d – a – b – e – c

Question 16:

a. At a coastal school near the new residential blocks, students used a simple booking app to water spinach beds before class.

b. Therefore, rooftop gardens should be treated as small learning spaces, not cheap decorations that solve urban heat by themselves.

c. As urbanisation covers more open ground with hard concrete, some schools are turning flat roofs into gardens instead of leaving them empty.

d. The project made the top-floor rooms cooler, but it also created extra work during dry weeks when water pressure fell.

e. The idea attracts support because it brings agriculture into the city and gives children contact with nature above crowded streets.

A. c – a – e – d – b        B. c – e – a – d – b        C. e – c – a – d – b        D. c – e – d – a – b

Question 17:

a. That explanation is convincing until the same plans include expensive cafés and serviced flats that former residents cannot afford to enter, let alone rent.

b. In many fast-growing river cities, the most heated urbanisation debate today is not about taller skylines but about who moves when flood defences are built.

c. For this reason, climate-ready urbanisation should measure success by safer streets, stable communities, and reliable public facilities, not by cleaner photos of a waterfront.

d. Officials often present new riverside parks as public infrastructure because trees, ponds, and wider paths can absorb heavy rain better than narrow roads and old drains.

e. One neighbourhood report showed this tension clearly: after families were relocated, flooding decreased, yet the number of small repair shops also fell sharply nearby.

A. b – d – a – e – c        B. b – a – d – e – c        C. d – b – a – e – c        D. b – d – e – a – c

Urbanisation can make a health system look modern while leaving basic care oddly unreachable. New apartment towers, factories and transport links may arrive before clinics, pharmacies and preventive teams are distributed across the same map. A district can therefore become better connected economically while its residents become harder to reach medically. When minor infections, pregnancy checks or chronic conditions are delayed, hospital wards begin to absorb needs (18) __________.

The pressure is not simply numerical. People in rented rooms or informal jobs may live far from registered providers, work shifts that do not match clinic hours, or lack documents for subsidised care, a pattern (19) __________. Municipal leaders often answer by expanding hospitals or announcing specialist departments. (20) __________. If vaccination, screening and early treatment remain distant, the system still meets many residents only after their conditions have worsened.

Digital booking systems and mobile clinics may reduce some delays, (21) __________, especially in districts where stable addresses, internet access and paid time off are unevenly available. The deeper challenge is therefore not merely to treat illness once it reaches the hospital, but (22) __________.

Question 18:

A. which planners may misread as evidence that migration alone causes overcrowding
B. that primary care should have addressed before they became costly emergencies
C. and local clinics have treated similar cases as signs that prevention works
D. because officials assume that hospital capacity can entirely replace neighbourhood screening

Question 19:

A. with healthcare access shaped by paperwork, clinic hours, and unstable living conditions
B. turned irregular schedules and insecure housing into barriers to routine medical care

C. where paperwork requirements and clinic-hour limits make subsidising care harder to reach

D. that proves unstable living conditions, not eligibility rules are the only obstacle to healthcare

Question 20:

A. As a result, specialist departments should take over prevention once clinics become crowded
B. In practice, emergency investment proves that local screening is less urgent than treatment
C. Even so, hospital capacity can hide weak primary care rather than improve everyday access
D. For this reason, hospital expansion makes access depend less on neighbourhood providers nearby

Question 21:

A. as if online appointment slots alone made clinic location less important
B. provided they are paired with guidance that residents can actually use
C. with hospital equipment becoming the reason residents avoid preventive care
D. by shifting responsibility for accessibility from providers to patients themselves

Question 22:

A. whether emergency departments can make preventive care seem less urgent
B. rather than connecting local clinics with the planning of new districts
C. while adding health desks after housing projects become fully occupied already
D. to build prevention, registration and screening into the city’s growth itself

Cities That Breathe

Every rainy season, millions of urban residents watch the streets fill with water and wonder whether their city was ever designed with nature in mind. For most of the twentieth century, the answer was no. Cities expanded rapidly, covering farmland with concrete and replacing rivers with pipe systems, and the result has been more and more flooding, less and less green space, and a steady rise in urban temperatures. The more impervious surfaces a city has, the harder it becomes for rainwater to go anywhere but up.

That is precisely the concern that landscape architect Kongjian Yu set out to deal with. Growing up in rural China, he watched a slow, willow-lined river transform into a dangerous, channelised stream after modernisation removed its natural buffers. Motivated by that loss, Yu developed the sponge city concept, which seeks to restore what urbanisation has taken away. Rather than channelling stormwater away, sponge cities use ponds, wetlands, and plantings to absorb and store it, improving both ecological health and the quality of life for residents. Permeable surfaces replace sealed pavements, rain gardens collect runoff, and green roofs reduce the load on drainage infrastructure. This approach has since been adopted at over 640 sites across 250 municipalities in China.

The benefits, however, go well beyond flood control. Vertical forests and tree-lined corridors help reduce urban heat, lower residents' carbon footprint, and make cities more comfortable to live in. These are not decorative additions; they are climate adaptation strategies that respond to several problems at once. Resilience, experts argue, is only unlocked when adaptation and mitigation are pursued hand in hand, working with nature rather than against it.

Whether cities worldwide can expand green infrastructure fast enough remains a concern among urban planners. But for communities that have lived with seasonal flooding for years, a park that drinks the storm feels less like a design trend and more like a genuine solution.

[Adapted from Esri Blog]

Question 23: Which of the following is true according to paragraph 4?

A. Some urban planners are still unsure whether green infrastructure can be expanded quickly enough.

B. Cities worldwide have already expanded green infrastructure fast enough to prevent seasonal flooding.

C. Communities affected by flooding usually see green parks as only a fashionable design idea.

D. Urban planners believe sponge cities are no longer useful for areas with seasonal flooding.

Question 24: The word “impervious” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to __________.

A. sealed        B. crowded        C. uneven        D. fragile

Question 25: Which of the following is NOT presented as part of the nature-based response in paragraph 2?

A. Letting some paved areas allow rainwater to pass into the ground.

B. Using planted areas to collect runoff before it overloads drains.

C. Increasing the speed at which stormwater is pushed through pipes.

D. Holding excess rain temporarily in ponds and wetland-like spaces.

Question 26: The word "its" in paragraph 2 refers to __________.

A. a willow-lined river                B. rural China        

C. a modern drainage canal        D. modernization

Question 27: Which of the following best paraphrases the underlined sentence in paragraph 3?

A. Experts believe that cities can only achieve full resilience if they prioritize adaptation strategies over mitigation while cooperating with natural forces.

B. According to experts, true resilience is exclusively attained when adaptation and mitigation are executed simultaneously in harmony with natural processes.

C. Experts argue that resilience requires adaptation and mitigation to be developed separately, provided that both ultimately seek to control natural elements.

D. It is suggested by experts that combining adaptation and mitigation will automatically guarantee resilience, regardless of how extreme natural events become.

Question 28: In which paragraph does the author discuss how the water-absorbing infrastructure functions as a multi-purpose climate adaptation strategy?

A. Paragraph 1        B. Paragraph 2        C. Paragraph 3        D. Paragraph 4

Question 29: Which paragraph highlights a logistical concern about the pace of implementing green infrastructure before affirming its practical value?

A. Paragraph 1        B. Paragraph 2        C. Paragraph 3        D. Paragraph 4

Question 30: The word "genuine" in paragraph 4 is OPPOSITE in meaning to __________.

A. superficial        B. temporary        C. risky        D. impractical