A. Sprinters cock the lead knee high and drive the foot into the track with a stiffened ankle—a punch delivered with high velocity and a sudden stop.

B. The swiftest runners achieve top speed by swinging their legs more rapidly than slow runners while repositioning their limbs between takeoff and landing.

C. What faster runners do better is apply a more powerful force to the ground through their foot, and, just as critically, do this in a briefer contact period.

D. Both swift runners and slow runners take roughly the same time when airborne to move their legs back into position for the next stride.

A. If the regions, peoples and nations currently demanding more freedom seem to be driven by “cultural nationalism”, that in turn is driven by technological change plus global competition.

B. Information-rich societies reward the development of human capital; so, the ability to study in your first language, participate in a rich national culture and create unique local selling points for incoming foreign investment is more important than ever.

C. The mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the center has limited the reality of regional democracy and pushed autonomous regions such as Catalonia to fight for self-determination.

D. Above the problems of economic failure and racial polarization, the positive factor driving progressive nationalisms, from Scotland to Catalonia, is technological change.

A. Commonwealth enthusiasts believe that the Commonwealth has supposedly vast potential, which could be augmented further with a little additional funding, yet membership will always remain cheaper than the EU, and not only in terms of the UK’s direct financial contribution.

B. But given the fact that there are huge variations in the levels of trade conducted by individual member states, it is difficult to see what we can actually learn from an average figure for “Commonwealth advantage” between two notional Commonwealth states.

C. In this light, the Commonwealth is the international relations equivalent of a homeopathic remedy – a cadre of staff so small as to be almost invisible when dissolved across a body comprising 2.4 billion people, which nevertheless does or could achieve miraculous results.

D. Somehow, this Commonwealth of the future will cost less than the EU in terms of the vast number of hours required to negotiate its treaties and other formal agreements; it will not require members to make significant concessions in return for some collective good; and it will have only the most rudimentary of mechanisms to enforce its will.

A. Museums are not neutral spaces, where objects exist without context; they do more than allow us to engage with history and art.

B. They are forms in and of themselves, which, to varying degrees, enable and propagate missions and legacies through design and architecture.

C. Try as some museums might to go unnoticed as simply the pedestal or wall on which history and art work hangs, there is no escaping the weight of the objects and stories told within their architecture.

D. A museum of modern art in Cologne isn’t so different from a museum of modern art in Chicago – you see the same major-canon artists, arranged in more or less the same way.

A. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it.

B. If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations.

C. On the premise that the colonial epoch had not permitted the growth of indigenous economic institutions, the new states were encouraged, largely by the West, to entrust economic modernization to parastatal corporations administered by inexperienced bureaucrats.

D. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.