Fake News

Read the selection below from the article.

What makes false news so much more enticing than true news? The researchers believe the answer is that false news has more novelty, which makes it both more surprising and more valuable — and thus, more likely to be retweeted.

They figured this out by studying a random selection of about 25,000 tweets seen by 5,000 people and comparing their content to the other tweets those people would have seen in the previous 60 days. They also examined the emotional content of replies to these tweets and found that false tweets prompted greater feelings of surprise and disgust. True tweets, on the other hand, generated replies expressing sadness and trust.

Which conclusion is BEST supported by the selection?

• People are disgusted when they find out that a tweet is false news.

• True tweets are usually about subjects that are sad and familiar.

• People enjoy retweeting tweets that have unexpected content.

• The tweets in the study were carefully chosen for their content.

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Is the author of the article suggesting that the researchers' findings are encouraging? Which sentence from the article supports this conclusion?

• Yes; A new scientific analysis offers rigorous proof of something that social media acolytes have known for years: Twitter is an excellent platform for spreading actual news.

• No; A team of data scientists and social media experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to these dispiriting conclusions after examining the spread of thousands of tweets shared by millions of people over a span of 12 years.

• Yes; "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information," wrote Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of the MIT Media Lab and Sinan Aral of MIT's Sloan School of Management.

• No; Vosoughi, Roy and Aral used this framework to map the spread of information on Twitter since it was created in 2006 all the way through to last year.

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Read the paragraph below from the article.

Instead, they categorized news as either “true” or “false.” If a tweet is labeled “false,” that doesn’t imply that the person who wrote it is trying to pull a fast one. It only means that the claim in the tweet is inaccurate.

How does the phrase "trying to pull a fast one" impact the tone of the paragraph?

• It adds a humorous tone.

• It makes the tone more alarming.

• It adds a somber tone.

• It makes the tone more informal.

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Read the selection below from the article.

Then the trio was ready to start making comparisons. They weren't pretty.

How does the wording of the second sentence impact the meaning of the paragraph?

• It lets the reader know that the comparisons were subjective in nature.

• It informs the reader that the comparisons were complicated.

• It suggests to the reader that the researchers could have taken more time to make the comparisons.

• It alerts the reader that the content of the comparisons was negative.

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What is the occasion?

• False news is the rumor mill and people are feeding off of its evils.

• False news is building bias and prejudice.

• False news is being spread more often than real news.

• Everyone is believing what they read and does not question credibility.

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What is the purpose of the article?

• To understand how false news is spread and the importance of containing it.

• Inform society over the falsities of social media.

• To help society appreciate the validity of social platforms such as Twitter.

• To stress that everyone is corrupt and people thrive and enjoy dishonesty.

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Write a summary for the article.

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