Rural Americans have inferior Internet access - PAU 2014 inglés

The 260 residents of Ten Sleep, Wyoming, drive at least 26 miles to buy groceries and 112 to catch a plane. You wouldn’t expect an Internet entrepreneur to launch a startup here. But in 2006, Kent Holiday did just that, opening Eleutian Technology, where local teachers tutor Asian students in English through live online videos. He now employs about 500 teachers around the region.

Holiday was visiting his in-laws when he noticed the local telephone utility laying fiber-optic cable: Ten Sleep was getting high-speed Internet. In 2011, President Obama used Eleutian as an example of the Internet’s effects on rural economic development: “For local businesses, broadband access is helping them grow, prosper and compete in a global economy.”

But such access – the basic modern infrastructure many city-folk take for granted – is far from universal. Of the 19 million Americans who lack broadband access 14.5 million live in rural areas. Thirty percent of Indians living on reservations also lack access.

The more densely populated a place is, the more likely it is to have fast, affordable Internet. When people live far apart, service providers don’t profit enough to cover the costs of building and maintaining the physical infrastructure. If they do provide access, it’s often at higher prices and slower speeds than in urban areas. In the rural West, where 2 million people lack broadband access, topography is also a barrier. Mountains and narrow valleys can block signals from wireless towers and satellites and make it difficult to install fiber-optic cables.

Adapted from an article by Emily Guerin, High Country News, 3 February 2014

Research ship trapped in Antarctic ice because of weather, not climate change - PAU Valencia inglés 2014

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Comunidad Valenciana resueltos

The Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy is stuck in the Antarctic, in an area where there has been an increase in sea ice extent since the late 1970s, making ship operations difficult. Is this situation evidence that global warming is exaggerated?

The impact of climate change on ice at both poles is complex. Actually, the two polar regions have experienced very different trends in ice extent. Arctic sea ice has been declining in extent in every month of the year, with the maximum loss of almost 14% per decade being found in September. In contrast, sea ice extent around the Antarctic has increased in every month of the year with the largest increase being almost 4% per decade in March.

The reasons for the trends in sea ice are still being debated. However, for the Arctic it is estimated that the emission of greenhouse gases has contributed 50–60% of the decline of Arctic sea ice. The remaining contribution is believed to come from natural variability. But in the Antarctic the reason for the increase in ice is less clear. The pattern of sea ice change around the Antarctic is dominated by a decrease to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula and an increase across the Ross Sea, which can be attributed to more storm activity between these two areas and to the strength and direction of the winds. This pattern of change is consistent with the increasing temperatures observed over the west Antarctica, where temperatures have risen as much as anywhere in the southern hemisphere.

Adapted from an article by John Turner, theguardian.com, 3 January 2014

A talent for spying - EOI Islas Baleares inglés C2 resuelto

The publication of the history of MI6 reveals the British gift for espionage. The concept of an authorised history of a secret agency, which did not officially exist until 1992, is slippery, to say the least. The publication of Professor Keith Jeffery’s MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909 – 1949, is notable for the very fact of its existence as well as the secrets that it reveals. It also invites a much broader question. Why is British identity so bound up with espionage and subterfuge? Have the British made unusually good spies, and if so, do they continue to do so in today’s very different diplomatic environment?
MI6 began with a mistake. ―We went to the office and remained there all day but saw no one, nor was there anything to do‖. That was the verdict of Mansfield Cumming in 1909 after his first day at work as head of the foreign section of the new Secret Service Bureau, the agency that later became the Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6). For once there was simple explanation: Cumming had accidentally started work a week early.
That inauspicious start quickly gave way to serious victories. La Dame Blanche, the most successful intelligence network of the First World War, orchestrated 880 men and women working behind enemy lines. During the operation to penetrate occupied France and Germany in the Second World War, an agent’s average life expectancy was three weeks. An incalculable debt is owed to the bravery of those men and women.
But even armed with the evidence of this book, taking measure of MI6 is unusually difficult. First, although MI6 has opened up in recent years (it now has a more conventional recruitment process than the donnish tap on the shoulder) it remains much more secretive than its sister agency MI5. Second, Mr Jeffrey’s evidence covers only 1909- 1949 – perhaps because it stops just short of the most embarrassing era in MI6’s history. In 1951, a Cambridge spy ring was exposed, in which double agents such as Kim Philby had betrayed British state secrets in the service of the Soviet Union.
That MI6 was once so dominated by Oxbridge and the public schools exposes both the genius and the fault line in British intelligence. The British class and education system, by honing the ability to hide real feelings beneath charm and polish, made for natural spies. Charm, in Evelyn Waugh’s phrase, ―is the English disease‖. But the ability to say one thing while feeling another has practical benefits. ―For the British it could be said that the inclination to deceive is already available as a natural asset,‖ concluded one American intelligence chief. Indeed, the United States did not even have a secret service until 1942.
In recent decades, MI6 has been accused of being slow to adapt. The absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undeniably tarnished its reputation. And MI6 was influenced by America’s overreliance on high-tech intercepts, rather than face-to-face human intelligence. But 9/11 showed that high-tech systems can only augment traditional intelligence, never replace it.
MI6 has continued to punch above its weight. Oleg Gordievsky’s defection was a Cold War triumph. And Libya’s decision to abandon its nuclear programme in 2003 owed much to MI6’s relationships, its agents’ ability to persuade. When it comes to human intelligence, it remains the case that nobody does it better. 

Adapted from The Times, August 2010.

How China is winning the school race - PAU Cataluña inglés 2013

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Cataluña resueltos

China’s education performance—at least in cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong—is as spectacular as the country’s rapid economic expansion, surpassing many more advanced countries. But what is behind this success?

Surprise came when the results of the OECD’s international maths, science and reading tests —the 2009 PISA tests—were published. Shanghai, taking part for the first time, came top in all three subjects. Meanwhile, Hong Kong, which did well in the last decade, has gone from good to great. In this global ranking, it came fourth in reading, second in maths and third in science. These two Chinese cities outstripped leading education systems around the world. The results for Beijing are not quite as spectacular. “But they are still high,” says Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s head of education statistics.

Cheng Kai-Ming, Professor of Education at Hong Kong University, attributes the results to “a devotion to education not shared by other cultures.” More than 80 % of Shanghai’s older secondary students attend after-school tutoring. They may spend another three to four hours each day on homework under close parental supervision. Such dedication also reflects the ferociously competitive university entrance examinations. Prof. Cheng says Chinese parents are definitely devoted to their children’s education.

Certainly these two open and dynamic cities regard as valuable to adopt the best educational practices from around the world to ensure success. Under the slogan “First class city, first class education”, Shanghai re-equipped classrooms, upgraded schools and revised the curriculum in the last decade. Teachers were trained in more interactive methodology and computers were brought in. The city’s schools are now a model for the country. About 80 % of Shanghai school leavers go to university compared to an average of 24 % in China.

Last year Shanghai claimed to be the first Chinese city to provide free schooling for all migrant children. Shanghai controls who lives and works in the city, allowing only the best and the brightest students to become residents with access to jobs and schools. “For over 50 years Shanghai has been accumulating talent, the cream of the cream in China. That gives it an incredible advantage,” says Ruth Heyhoe, former head of the Chinese Institute of Education.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong was forced into educational improvements when its industries moved to cheaper Chinese areas in the 1990s. To continue being a service centre for China, the city had to upgrade knowledge and skills. In the last decade Hong Kong has concentrated on raising the level for all students, and today Hong Kong’s education system is rated among the best in the world. “If we want to have high achievement, we need experts in secondary schools,” said Catherine Chan, secretary for education in the Hong Kong government. Teachers are selected from the top 30 % of the university graduates. By contrast, according to the OECD, the US selects from the bottom third. In Hong Kong, over one-fifth of government money is spent on education every year.

Both Hong Kong and Shanghai are changing their educational models and no-one knows how this will result in terms of quality. However, they believe they are moving in the right direction. Their societies are changing rapidly and for both cities, reaching the top might be easier than staying there.

Text adapted from BBC News

What the au pair saw - PAU inglés Cataluña 2011

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Cataluña resueltos

Silvia, an 18-year-old from Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, could not believe how mean her employers were. They hardly spoke to her, made her work very long hours for very little pay and restricted her access to food. Silvia didn’t work in a shop. She was an au pair to a middle-class British family.
Silvia’s story comes from a new book, called Au Pair, which takes a full and honest look at British families from the sincere point of view of the girls who come to look after their children and help around the house.
The book focuses on the experiences of 50 Slovakian au pairs who have lived with more than 100 host families in London. Its author is Zuzana Burikova, a Slovakian sociologist who has been working on this project for more than three years.
The book’s most noticeable feature is the pejorative view that au pairs develop towards their host British families. In particular, they are highly critical of the ‘having it all’ culture.
British parenting, it seems, is shockingly bad. The book suggests that the British concept of a woman’s right to a career as well as a family is viewed negatively by au pairs. The author thinks that “au pairs generally feel that any family that chooses to have an au pair must, by definition, either be lazy, or lack proper care and consideration for children and for people in general”.
In the book we can read about the experience of an au pair called Jarmila, whose host mother worked at home as a clothes designer. Even when she was not working, her child spent all his time with Jarmila, who really felt like a second mother. Another case is that of Darinka, who was fascinated by “English mothers constantly talking about quality time and feeling guilty if they were not actually reading to or playing with their children”. In fact, in most cases it was pretty clear they spent very little time with their children. “English women do love their children,” Darinka reluctantly admits, “but the problem is that they are just not able to combine childcare, housework and a career.”
From the experiences in the book we can learn that “food is a particularly tricky issue,” says Ms. Burikova. “I’m surprised that children and parents do not eat the same food and that parents buy healthy food like vegetables and fish for themselves but not for their children.” Zuzana Burikova explains that “the British like TV programmes where experts tell them how to keep their home, since they don’t know how to do it themselves. That’s why they need au pairs.”
And yet, as with all things, there is a flip side. And not all families are cold and unfeeling.
In the book we can read the experience of Tina. Tina worked in London as an au pair about nine years ago. She had an absolutely terrific time in there, and there was good understanding between Tina and her host family, as a result of which the family decided to put her up until she finished her studies.
After having studied all these experiences, Zuzana Burikova comes to the conclusion that none of all these au pairs’ negative experiences stop people from applying for the job. Most Slovakian women go to Britain to work as an au pair in order to learn the language and earn some money at the same time, but there are also others that accept this job because it’s a way of escaping from their families or simply because they have just split up with their boyfriend. So, up to a point, the arrangement suits them.

Text adapted from The Sunday Times (August 1, 2010)

Living in harmony with the land - PAU inglés Cataluña 2012

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Cataluña resueltos

The Himba live in the northwest of Namibia in the Kunene region, near the river of the same name. The land is the driest and most barren region of Namibia, with less than 250 mm of rain a year. There is little farming and few roads. The mountains are hard to access. The largest town in the region, Opuwo, has only about 5,000 inhabitants. But this impenetrable wilderness has also meant that Himba people have been able to preserve their traditional way of life.

These semi-nomadic people number between 20,000 and 50,000. They live in the northwest of Namibia and mainly breed cows and goats. It is the children’s job to look after the goats and also to grind corn, while the adults look after the cows. Himba society is divided into groups and clans and, unsurprisingly, the head of a clan is its eldest male member.
It has not been easy for the Himba to preserve their traditions. In 1904, when Namibia was ruled by Germany, Himba people were nearly exterminated. Starting in the 1920s, South African rulers confined them to a restricted “homeland,” officially forbidding them to trade, breed farm animals freely, or garden and collect wild plants along the Kunene River. When dry weather and war struck Namibia in the 1980s, it looked as if the culture of the indigenous Himba people might disintegrate. Ninety percent of Himba cattle, the centre of their economy and identity, died. Some families left for Angola. Yet they resisted—even if at times it meant eating the hides they slept on.
With the peace and good rains that came to Namibia in the 1990s, the Himba rebuilt their herds and, working with international activists, helped block a proposed hydro-electric dam that would have inundated ancestral lands along the Kunene. They also have benefited from new opportunities provided by the government of independent Namibia—mobile schools where Himba children learn English and conservancies that give Himba control of wildlife and tourism on their lands. Vengapi Tijvinda, a grandmother in her 50s, lived through this rebirth. In the 1980s she was making baskets for tourists.
Now she has returned to farming and raising cattle: “Life is still the same, but the children can read and write. I am a member of a conservancy, and now we can taste animal meat again”.
In 1996 the government of Namibia made it possible for the Himba to profit from increased wildlife populations through a program that allows them to manage their shared property as a registered conservancy. This programme—officially called the Community Based Natural Resource Management Programme—requires that a group wanting to form a conservancy establish its membership and define the limits of the land they share, write a constitution and elect a governing committee. When the group’s application is accepted by Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism, the conservancy begins to manage the wildlife and other resources on its land according to principles of sustainable use, while continuing with traditional farming. Because conservancies can also control tourism on their land, they are able to contract with commercial tour operators and establish their own tourist facilities. Because a healthy wildlife population is a big tourist attraction, illegal hunting is down, animal numbers are increasing, and efforts are going into maintaining the natural environment that supports wildlife. And perhaps most important, indigenous people like the Himba, whose lives were for generations largely controlled by outside governments, are regaining local control over the future of their communities.

Text adapted from National Geographic

The day I met the strange and inscrutable Steve Jobs - PAU 2012

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Cataluña resueltos

One morning in Paris six years ago, I found myself sitting opposite Steve Jobs. I was feeling really excited, as getting an interview with Jobs had become an obsession. In recent years, particularly since his health had declined, he had rarely talked directly to the media. But then, one day I got the news: I’d been given an interview.
Over the years I’d built up a vague impression of what I could expect: there were stories about the notorious “flamethrower treatment” that he would give to anyone who made a mistake. Beyond this, I expected him to be something like the other captains of industry that I had come across, with magnetic personalities and enormous presence.
However, the reality turned out to be very different. The interview took place at Apple’s Paris Expo, an exhibition of the company’s latest technology. Once he had finished taking questions from the media I was asked to accompany him on a walk around the Expo. Like everything else in Jobs’ life, the program was meant to be strictly managed: a quick turn around the show floor, and then downstairs to his temporary office for our interview. But as soon as Jobs began his walk, a wild group of Apple fans suddenly appeared, shouting his name and surrounding us. Jobs visibly shrank as they approached. His bodyguards quickly took him downstairs. A public relations officer invited me to follow him. Suddenly I was in a room with the man I’d been running after for years. But it wasn’t what I expected at all. Yes, the man sitting in front of me looked like the Steve Jobs I knew. But the Steve Jobs I was used to seeing was always in command, always in control, when launching new products. This one, however, seemed frightened and a little confused.
We had half an hour scheduled to talk. I kept looking up at the clock. His assistant indicated that he still needed time to settle. Clearly disturbed by his brief encounter with the real world, he came to sit opposite me and adopted a defensive posture. Although we talked for 30 minutes, it wasn’t a fluent and easy conversation. He spent too much of his time avoiding questions that he felt were inappropriate.
I asked him about Apple’s environmental policy, which had received some criticism recently. He rejected the claim that Apple’s products were less green than its rivals with the same argument that he had always used in press conferences. When I pushed for more details he simply refused to go any further.
I mentioned his health. It was a year after he had had a pancreatic cancer operation, and it seemed that he had beaten the disease successfully. He refused to give me any details about it. For most of my time with him, it seemed he just wasn’t mentally in the room. My presence seemed to be another reminder that not everything could be controlled.
This was, after all, a man whose life was so carefully organized that he rarely had to do anything that he didn’t want to. He used to spend most of his life in or around Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. He followed a strict routine. He was so used to getting his way that when his cancer first appeared he tried to beat it simply through focusing on a diet of fruit and vegetables. It didn’t work.
All in all, I was supposed to have just met the most attractive character that the business world has seen in decades. In person, Steve Jobs turned out to be the most inscrutable and peculiar entrepreneur I’d ever interviewed.

Text adapted from The Times (August 27, 2011)

Why kids bully: because they're popular - PAU inglés Cataluña 2013

>Exámenes selectividad inglés Cataluña resueltos

Mothers tell their children that mean kids behave that way because they have unhappy home lives, feel inadequate, or don’t have enough friends; or because they lack empathy. But a new study suggests some mean kids actually behave that way simply because they can. It has now been proved that the more popular a kid becomes, the more central to the social network of the school, the more aggressive the behaviour he or she engages in. At least, that was the case in North Carolina, where students from 19 middle and high schools were studied for 5 years by researchers at the University of California-Davis.
Authors Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee interviewed public-school kids seven times over the course of their study, starting when the students were in grades 6, 7 and 8. They asked the students to say who their friends were and used the data to create friendship maps. They then asked the kids who was unkind to them and whether they bullied anyone. Researchers then tried to determine the pathways of aggression. What they found was that only one-third of the students engaged in any bullying at all — physical force, insults or spreading gossip — but those who were becoming more popular in the school bullied more. Only when kids reached the very top 2 % of the school’s social hierarchy or fell into the bottom 2 % did their behavior change; these kids were the least aggressive. “Seemingly normal well-adjusted kids can be aggressive,” says Faris, whose results are published in the American Sociological Review. “We found that school status increases aggression.”
Although authors do not discard psychological or background influences as underlying causes of bullying, they believe that popularity is at least as important. “It’s one of the few times I can remember in social sciences where race and family background seem to make very little difference,” says Faris. “Those demographic and socioeconomic factors don’t seem to matter as much as where the kids are in the school hierarchy in terms of their popularity.” Faris also found that kids who cared more about popularity, were more aggressive. Surprisingly, though, hostile behavior did not make them more popular. “The evidence suggests that aggression does not increase status,” he says. Then again, bullying works mostly because kids believe it does.
Another stereotype the study destroyed was that males and females bully differently. Boys spread gossip less often than girls did. And girls were less physically violent to each other than boys were. Gender-on-gender bullying was more prevalent among girls than boys, but boys were more likely to be hostile toward girls than the other way around. However, gender wasn’t entirely a neutral factor. If a girl knew a lot of boys, or a boy knew a lot of girls at a school where there wasn’t much mixing of the sexes, those kids’ popularity would go up, presumably because they provided a bridge to contact with potential dates. And, yes, the “gender-bridge” kids, as the study called them, seemed to be more aggressive than others.
If bullying is actually more a result of school hierarchy than of psychology, Faris believes there might be a more effective solution than trying to change the behavior of the bullies. “The majority of kids who witness bullying, either do not oppose it or encourage it,” says Faris. “Those are the ones who give these kids their status. We need to change their minds.” 

Text adapted from Time (February 8, 2011)