Ordinary Treasures - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Ordinary treasures

When Andy Warhol, one of the twentieth century's most influential artists, died his four-floor house was so full of items that the only rooms you could walk through were the kitchen and the bedroom. It turned out that Warhol had compulsive hoarding disorder, which is defined as the excessive accumulation of objects and a refusal to throw them away. But Warhol's case is not uncommon; around five per cent of Americans – nearly 15 million people – suffer from compulsive hoarding disorder. This disorder interferes with daily activities such as sleeping and cooking, and in an extreme form it can harm one's health, be a fire risk and even lead to death. Although researchers suspect that the disorder is more widespread in the West, cases of hoarding have been recorded in almost every country.

Twenty years ago, compulsive hoarding disorder was a relatively unexplored psychological phenomenon, often treated as an aspect of obsessive compulsive disorder – the compulsion to repeat a certain action over and over. However, it is now recognised as a separate disorder. Scientists from many disciplines, including psychologists, neurologists and behavioural researchers are looking at gene sequences within hoarders' DNA and scanning their brains to try to understand their behaviour in the hope that they can be helped.

There are several theories for the behaviour. First of all, hoarding appears to run in families and may have genetic causes, with family members often having similar issues. In a study of 219 families, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that families with two or more hoarding members showed a linkage between hoarding behaviour and chromosome 14 – one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up human DNA. A second theory states that the instinct to hoard may be an evolutionary survival strategy: there are plenty of examples of hoarding in the animal kingdom. The Arctic gray jay hoards around 100,000 berries and insects so that it has enough food for the long winter months. Humans, however, are the only species that take the strategy to extremes, sometimes filling their homes with so many objects that they eventually become uninhabitable.

Recent psychological research, however, emphasises that hoarders do not just collect junk; nor are they lazy or disorganised, even if their homes are chaotic. Many hoarders have normal lives, with regular jobs and normal relationships with friends and family. Cognitively, hoarders tend to be emotional, attaching sentimental value to belongings that other people would discard. They also tend to be intelligent, well educated and more creative than average. However, they can be indecisive and may start several different projects at the same time.

Carol Mathews, a leading researcher into the condition, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show brain activity in the process of decision making. People with compulsive hoarding disorder display increased activity in an area of the brain related to decision making when asked to organise objects. This increased activity is due to their greater emotional attachment to possessions. In other tests, Mathews found that people with hoarding behaviour had difficulty grouping similar objects and remembering the sequence of things. In effect, people with compulsive hoarding disorder do not categorise objects in the same way as other people, and when they are asked to do so, show an increase in brain activity associated with the decision-making process. It seems that people with hoarding behaviour see and treat objects differently and might have a different appreciation of the physical world. For example, a pile of objects in the middle of a room may be seen as a work of art by a hoarder rather than just a heap of junk.

Treating hoarding effectively may depend upon whether we can identify specific character traits. Dr Monika Eckfield of the University of California, San Francisco, believes there are two different kinds of people with hoarding behaviour. She calls one kind impulsive-acquirers, who buy objects out of excitement and keep them because they are interested in them. The other type are the worried-keepers – the hoarders who acquire items passively and keep them in case they need them in future. Worried-keepers spend more time sorting and organising belongings. While both kinds of hoarders of either gender find it nearly impossible to throw anything away, more men than women belong to the former category whilst more women fall into the worried-keeper group.