You are going to read four extracts which are all concerned in some way with products. For questions 1-8, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

• You want to improve the quality of life, without using drugs or stimulants
• you are ready to start the journey back to health and fitness, however short or long it may be
• you would prefer to use stress to your advantage rather than be its victim
• you are prepared to take charge of your own destiny and benefit from your own well-being
• you would like to get back the shape nature intended you to have
• you like to understand the principles behind concepts before taking action
• you want to enhance your mental powers and your ability to focus on the task in hand
• short-term fixes, be they through patches or pills, gimmicks or gizmos, hold no appeal
• you are prepared to take a step at a time, build upon your success and take pleasure in the results
• you have the temperament and strength of character to endure the journey to physical, mental and spiritual health

How important is design?

All toasters are not exactly the same under the skin but they are as near as makes no difference. They are boxes which neatly grill the bread, waffles or whatever between little electric fires and eject them just before they start to burn: an easy, well-proven technology whether it is purely mechanical or microchip-controlled. The last fundamental innovation in toaster design was in 1927, when the Sunbeam company of America marketed the first pop-up model. Since then, there has been little to do design-wise except to alter the styling according to the tastes of the time.

Designers try to give toasters the equivalent of sunroofs and anti-lock brakes - wider slots, double slots, 'cool wall' designs and the like - but cannot get away from the fact that you need only two controls: a push-down lever and a timer. Upgrades merely dress up a timeless concept and are anyway almost all adopted immediately by other manufacturers.

So what you buy is styling, which can be a dirty word among 'pure' designers, since it is really just packaging, little different from the box the toaster comes in. 'Real' design, it is said, is more fundamental. This is arguable: one of the greatest designers of the 20th Century, the French-born, America-based Raymond Loewy, was principally a stylist, and who can argue with the power of his famous creation, the Coca-Cola bottle, which is functionally far less efficient than a standard beer or wine bottle?

Dream Cars

Daydreaming schoolchildren around the world love to doodle weird and wonderful cars. Most grow up to drive something much more visually mundane than those adolescent flights of fancy. But a few are actively encouraged to continue drawing extraordinary and largely unrealistic modes of transport when they are studying at college. They are the car designers of tomorrow, who will shape what we will drive in the next century.

On a visit to the Art Centre in Los Angeles, which runs a course for vehicle designers, I was shown some of the work in progress by Ronald Hill, head of transportation design. Its visual excitement contrasted starkly with the dull, practical silhouettes of many modern production cars.

So are such unrealistic shapes out of touch with the real world of cars, and does it really benefit students to continue their schoolday doodles, albeit in a more sophisticated manner? Hill insists that the exploratory designs are vital, and argues that more realistic considerations are, at least temporarily, irrelevant. 'This may be the only chance in the career of these students when they can take some risk, stretch their imaginations and really let fly. There's plenty of time later on for them to worry about constraints of legislation and practical issues. We call this the 'blue sky' period, when there really is no limit set on their design innovation.'

Catalogue Shopping in the USA

My favourite parts of the New York Times on Sunday are the peripheral bits - the parts that are so dull and obscure they exert a kind of hypnotic fascination. Above all I like the advertising supplements, like the gift catalogue from the Zwingle Company of New York offering scores of products of the things-you-never-knew-you-needed variety - an umbrella with a transistor radio in the handle. What a great country!

Once in a deranged moment I bought something myself from one of those catalogues, knowing deep in my mind that it would end in heartbreak. It was a little reading light that you clipped onto your book so as not to disturb anyone sleeping in the same room. In this respect it was outstanding because it barely worked. The light it cast was absurdly feeble (in the catalogue it looked like the sort of thing you could signal ships with if you got lost at sea) and left all but the first two lines of a page in darkness. I have seen more luminous insects. After about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has never been used again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it would all be a bitter disappointment. On second thoughts, if I ever ran one of those companies I would just send people an empty box with a note in it saying 'We have decided not to send you the item you've ordered because, as you well know, it would never work properly and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future.'