Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words.

Do you know anyone who suffers from equinophobia, pluviophobia or leukophobia? Or, to put it another way, do you know anyone who is very afraid of horses, rain or the colour white? You probably don’t, and yet these are recognized medical conditions, though very rare ones.

According to many surveys, more than ten per cent of people in the United States have some kind of phobia (the word comes from the Greek phobós, meaning fear). There are, of course, dozens of different kinds, ranging from the obscure to the well known. The names of most of them have been created by adding ‘phobia’ to a Greek or Latin root – a process that has turned into something of a word game, with people inventing names for conditions that perhaps exist only in theory (for example androidophobia, the fear of robots).

True phobias consist of an intense fear that produces a very strong desire to avoid the object of that fear. Without specialist help they are very difficult to control and tend to disrupt the daily life of the sufferer.

Phobias often originate from upsetting experiences earlier in life – for example an intense fear of dogs (cynophobia) often comes from having been bitten by one; In some cases, however, experts suggest phobias are to some extent evolutionary, arising not from personal experience but from inherited memory lying deep in our brains. Arachnophobia and ophidiophobia (the fear of snakes) are often suggested as examples: for our distant ancestors, who lived closer to nature than we do, fear of poisonous spiders and snakes would have served the useful evolutionary purpose of helping them avoid potentially fatal bites.

A common technique for treating some phobias is that of ‘progressive exposure’ in which sufferers are encouraged by a therapist to gradually get closer to the object of their fear. The idea is that at each step the patient realizes nothing bad is happening to them, which should lead to their fear gradually decreasing. With someone who is terrified of spiders, for example, the therapist might start by showing them a picture of a spider, then introducing a real spider in a glass box and slowly moving the box closer to them, then finally having them hold the spider in the palm of their hand. Therapy of this kind is said to be very effective, although in this case perhaps not very enjoyable.

(Note: Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN EIGHT WORDS)

81.   When we want to create a name to describe the condition of a person who has the fear of ice, the name is usually ended with _____________________________.

82.   A sufferer of a true phobia usually desires strongly to _________________________________.

83.   What are the two possible reasons for different kinds of phobias?

       _____________________________________________________________.

84.   In the last paragraph, the writer gives an example of the treatment of someone who is terrified of spiders to illustrate the meaning of ___________________________________.