30.
(A) Youins felt that traditional mental health care ignores the social, economic, emotional and faith-based needs of underserved communities.
(B) Now sober, Youins works as a peer-support specialist with the Connecticut Mental Health Center and has seen how COVID worsened mental health challenges in his city.
(C) It exacerbated social and economic inequities already known to drive and sustain poor mental health among marginalized communities.
(D) Substance use clinics and treatment sites were available, but he felt the care they provided overlooked who he was as a person.
(E) Rates of mental illness were already high in the U.S., but the pandemic intensified everything: Illness, loneliness, job loss, grief, and other stressors related to COVID induced a nationwide rise in anxiety and depression.


V. Reading Comprehension: Read the following passages and choose the best answer to each question.(40%)

Questions 31-35 are about the following book review :

Book Review - Between the World and Me

An excerpt of a book review by Michelle Alexander

For the past several years, I've greeted Ta-Nehisi Coates's essays and blog posts for The Atlantic with nothing short of gratitude. As an African American, he makes me proud. There is no other way to put it. I do not always agree with him, but it hardly matters. In a media world populated with pundits, so-called experts and public intellectuals driven by ego and familiar agendas, Coates's voice stands nearly alone — a black man raised in the streets of Baltimore who narrowly escaped the violence that lurked around every corner and dodged the clutches of the prisons and jails that were built for him, and who now speaks unpopular, unconventional and sometimes even radical truths in his own voice, unfiltered. He is invariably humble, yet subtly defiant. And people listen.

So when I heard that Coates had been inspired, after rereading James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," to write his own version for the current era, I was overjoyed. As a civil rights lawyer, activist, legal scholar and mother of three black children, I could not wait to read what Coates had to say to black young people at this moment in our history, a time when many are struggling to make sense of how frequently black lives can be destroyed legally through incessant police violence and mass incarceration. I imagined that Coates's new book would make plain for young people what is truly at stake in the struggle and disabuse them of the prevailing myths that breed complacency, defeatism or inaction.



I had to read "Between the World and Me" twice before I was able to decide whether Coates actually did what I expected and hoped he would. He did not. Maybe that's a good thing.

"The Fire Next Time" was first published in 1963, a time when the prevailing racial order was being challenged by young activists on a scale and with a fervor not seen since the Civil War. The first several pages of the book are styled in the form of a letter to Baldwin's 15-year-old nephew, offering advice about how to navigate the world he has been born into with black skin. Baldwin implores his nephew to awaken to his own dignity, humanity and power, and accept his responsibility to help "make America what it must become."

"Between the World and Me" carries a very different message, though it is also written in the form of a letter to a black teenage boy. The boy is Coates's 15-year-old son, who — like Baldwin's nephew — is trying to make sense of blatant racial injustice and come to grips with his place in a world that refuses to guarantee for him the freedoms that so many others take for granted.

"I write you in your 15th year," Coates states in the early pages. "And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. ... I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself."

One of the great virtues of both books is that they are not addressed to white people. The usual hedging and filtering and softening and overall distortion that seems to happen automatically — even unconsciously — when black people attempt to speak about race to white people in public is absent.

But here we reach a fork in the road. Baldwin, in writing to his nephew, does not deny the pain and horror of American notions of justice — far from it — but he repeatedly emphasizes the young man's power and potential and urges him to believe that revolutionary change is possible.

Coates's letter to his son seems to be written on the opposite side of the same coin. Rather than urging his son to awaken to his own power, Coates emphasizes over and over the apparent permanence of racial injustice in America, the foolishness of believing that one person can make a change. In what will almost certainly be the most widely quoted passage, Coates tells his son: "Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage."