Reading Practice for International Exams: Economic Impact of Conflict

Ace Your Reading Test: The Economic Impact of Conflict

Welcome to your reading practice session! On international exams, you’ll need to read complex texts quickly and accurately. The key isn’t to understand every single word, but to grasp the main ideas, find specific information, and understand the author’s purpose.

Before you start reading, skim the passage for 30-60 seconds. Just read the first sentence of each paragraph to get a general idea of the topic and structure. As you read more carefully, scan the text for keywords from the questions to locate answers efficiently. This exercise is designed to be challenging. Try to read the passage and answer all 10 questions in under 20 minutes to practice the time management skills you’ll need on test day. Let’s begin!

Reading Passage

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Keywords & Phrases

1. Belligerents: (noun) This is a formal word for the nations, groups, or people engaged in a war or conflict. We used it to say that the economic effects go “beyond the immediate belligerents.”
2. Ramifications: (noun) This word means the complex or unwelcome consequences of an action or event. We used it to talk about the “geopolitical ramifications” of war, meaning the wide-ranging political consequences.
3. Quantifiable: (adjective) If something is quantifiable, it means you can measure it and express it as a number. We used it to describe the “immediately quantifiable” direct costs of war, like the monetary value of a destroyed bridge.
4. Insidious: (adjective) This describes something that proceeds in a gradual, subtle way, but with very harmful effects. We said the indirect impacts of war ripple outward in “insidious ways” because they aren’t always obvious at first but are very damaging.
5. Supply shock: (phrase) In economics, this is an unexpected event that suddenly changes the supply of a product or commodity, resulting in a sudden change in its price. We used it to describe what happens when a conflict disrupts the flow of a critical resource like oil.
6. Boomerang effect: (idiom) This refers to a situation where an action has the unintended consequence of hurting the person who initiated it. We used it to explain how imposing sanctions can backfire and cause “economic pain for the countries that impose them.”
7. Pervasive: (adjective) This means spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people. We described the erosion of confidence as the most “pervasive indirect cost” because it affects almost everyone and every part of the global economy.
8. Capital flight: (phrase) This is an economic term for when money and assets rapidly flow out of a country due to an event of economic or political consequence. We used it to describe how investors pull their money out of a region when a conflict breaks out.
9. Austerity measures: (phrase) These are official government policies aimed at reducing government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both. We mentioned that countries might need “future austerity measures” to pay off the massive debt they accumulate during a war.
10. Antithesis: (noun) This means a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else. We used it in the powerful concluding sentence: “war is the antithesis of economic prosperity.”

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