Questions 68-70 are based on the following passage.

    Learning a new language is an inherently scary idea. But the skills gained from practicing a new language can feel like superpowers in the workplace and beyond. Research shows there is a direct correlation between bilingualism and intelligence, memory skills and higher academic achievement. As the brain more efficiently processes information, it is even able to stave off age-related cognitive decline.

    Depending on your native tongue and which new language you're learning, you can develop a diverse toolkit of both short-term and lifelong cognitive benefits. Of course, the further apart the language, the tougher the challenge (think Dutch and Vietnamese), but focusing on a specific application can drastically narrow the practice.

    The US Foreign Service Institute ( FSI) divides languages into four tiers of difficulty for native English speakers to learn, Group 1, the easiest of the bunch, includes French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swahili. According to FSI research, it takes a round 480 hours of practice to reach basic fluency in all Group 1 languages. time.

    The difficulty begins to spike as we move down the list. It takes 720 hours to achieve the same level of fluency in Group 2 languages, which include Bulgarian, Burmese, Greek, Hindi, Persian and Urdu. More difficult are Amharic, Cambodian, Czech, Finnish and Hebrew, which places them in Group 3. Group 4 is comprised of some of the most challenging languages for English speakers to grasp: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

    Lisa Meneghetti, a data analyst from Treviso, Italy, is a hyperpolyglot, meaning she is fluent in six or more languages - in her case English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Italian. When embarking on a new language, especially one with a lower difficulty curve that requires less cognitive stamina, she says her biggest challenge is to avoiding mixing words. The best way to avoid this issue, Meneghetti says, is to learn one language at a time, and to differentiate the linguistic families.

"Stave off" also means ....