Język angielski, matura próbna 2020 - poziom rozszerzony - pytania i odpowiedzi

A. At this point, using it as a serious power generation source is problematic. 

Doug was on his knees, face to the ground, squinting into the tiny entrance, nudging the male so he could get a better view of the five-digit number on the stainless steel band wrapped around the penguin’s left flipper.

“Three four six two seven. Have you got that?” Doug shouted over the wind.

“Three four six two seven,” Angela repeated back without looking up. She leafed through her notebook, browsing for the number. She’d banded thousands of birds over her fifteen years at Punta Verde; every penguin fitted with a tag was listed here, with a number, place and date. Yet despite such a wealth of data, most numbers were entered once and never again revisited. Tagging a penguin was akin to putting a note in a bottle, tossing it out to sea, and waiting for it to return.

“Red dot?” Doug asked hopefully.

Angela didn’t reply right away. While finding a tagged bird wasn’t as statistically significant as winning the lottery, it certainly felt that way – and the greatest jackpot of all was when they discovered a red-dot bird.

A red-dot was a bird tagged in the year when it was born which meant that it was possible to tell how old it was. Young penguins typically spent four to seven years at sea before they reached breeding age and returned to their colonies. Yet not all penguins returned, and the reasons had puzzled researchers for years. Because red-dot birds had been tracked since birth, Angela and the other naturalists knew more about them than about any other tagged bird – and they still wished they knew more. Whether five or twenty years had passed, finding a red-dot bird always felt like a family reunion.

But she was beginning to hope that this bird was not a red-dot. She was reluctant to let Doug handle the bird, even though she knew it was his duty. It was the expected order of things, for researchers to pass on their knowledge and skills. Once they identified a red-dot, they had to weigh it, then measure its feet and the density of feathers around its eyes.

Doug hadn’t yet weighed a penguin, and once he did, it would be one less thing he needed to learn from her. One less reason to join her on these trips. One day closer to not needing her at all and leaving. The life of a naturalist was a solitary one, spent more with animals than with people. Angela was aware of that but still she wished Doug would stay with her. She looked at the list again and felt relieved. It wasn’t a red-dot.

The Finnish company Rovio, which makes the hugely popular game app Angry Birds, isn’t content to sit back and rest on its laurels. It’s using the fame gained through its more than two billion downloads of Angry Birds editions to go to bat for real-life birds, whose existence in the Cook Islands of the Pacific South Seas is seriously threatened.

“Since people arrived on those islands, half of all the original bird species have never been seen again. This tragedy continues with 45 species on the brink of extinction today. The birds of the Pacific are seriously angry because predators have invaded their islands and are eating all their eggs,” says the company. “Animals such as rats got onto the land from the boats of people who were visiting. The introduction of these new predators changed the delicate ecological balance and drove many beautiful species to extinction. Just like in the game, these real-life angry birds and the community they live in need our help to defeat the predators before it’s too late.”

Angry Birds has partnered with the conservation nonprofit organization BirdLife International to collect funds and raise awareness about the hard situation of these endangered species. The recent version of the Angry Birds app educates users about these birds and how they can be helped. BirdLife will use the collected funds to hire boats, bait-spreading helicopters and expert staff to implement the removal of the invasive predators and put in place monitoring systems to prevent their return.

This isn’t the first time Angry Birds has used its vast network of gamers to raise awareness about environmental issues. Last November, it ran a competition called “Roll With the Pangolins,” to draw attention to the difficult situation of these Indonesian anteaters which have been poached to near extinction. The contest’s spokesperson was England’s Prince William, president of the partner organization United for Wildlife.

Uwagi