Język angielski, matura próbna 2021 - poziom rozszerzony - pytania i odpowiedzi

A. Researchers with the Earhart Project have released sonar images that, in their opinion, show the remains of Earhart’s twin-engine plane Lockheed Electra lying 600 feet below sea level off the coast of an island in the South Pacific. Amelia Earhart’s daring round-the-world flight was cut short when her plane vanished on June 2, 1937. Though rescue workers immediately began searching the area for signs of life, neither Earhart nor the plane was found. The U.S. government concluded in a report that the pilots ran out of fuel, crashed into the water and sank. But the question of why the plane went down remains one of history’s biggest mysteries.

B. Since Earhart’s disappearance, a number of other hypotheses have come up. Some theorists believe Earhart was actually working for the U.S. government. They suggest that she intentionally went off course to spy on Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific and was taken prisoner. Far more likely is the popular belief that due to mechanical errors Earhart was forced to touch down on an uninhabited South Pacific island called Nikumaroro. During a 2010 expedition, researchers uncovered there some clues such as three pieces of a pocketknife, shells that had been cut open, fragments of a glass cosmetic jar and bone fragments that may be human remains.

C. Scientists think they may have found proof that Earhart and her navigator crashed their plane and became castaways on the island. Working with a chemist, they have been testing the recovered cosmetic jar fragments. Based on the high mercury levels found on the surface, the substance once held in the jar has been identified as a brand of cosmetic used to bleach skin and remove spots – something the freckle-faced Earhart was known to have used. Even more intriguing to researchers is the fact that its fragments seem to have been intentionally shaped for use as cutting tools.

Pat arrived at the gallery early the next morning to find that the postman had already delivered post and there was a letter on the floor. She opened it and saw that it was an invitation to an opening at a gallery further down the street. They were always getting this sort of thing, and it struck her as depressing that there was a lot of this business in the city: one gallery sells its works to another, round and round in a circle, each producing just a slight profit. Eventually, a genuine customer would have to buy a picture, but where were they? Nobody seemed to notice them and the only person who had shown the slightest interest in buying something in her gallery this week had been determined to obtain a bargain.

She was holding the gallery invitation and was about to sit at her desk, when she stopped. Usually, when she came in in the morning, she would hear the alarm beeping signal and have to key in the security number to stop it. This had not happened this morning, or had it? It was perfectly possible to go through the motions of a familiar action and not remember that one had done it. Pat tried to remember who had been last to leave the gallery last night. Matthew had gone off to meet his father shortly after four and she had stayed at work until five. Then she recalled activating the alarm before locking the gallery door. She glanced towards the control box, across the semi-darkened gallery. Two small red lights blinked regular pulses back at her. That was strange. Normally, when she came in a single red light flashed. She knew that the two blinking red lights indicated that the alarm was inactive. But who turned it off? Pat looked about her to spot someone who might have arrived at the gallery before her but there was nobody there. She suddenly felt uneasy when she saw that the door in the corridor that led to Matthew’s office was open.

Now she felt frightened and ran across the room to switch on the lights. Not all the lights went on but the spotlights worked. Relieved that nothing was missing, she found the courage to enter Matthew’s office. Inside she saw that the burglar had managed to raise the lower panel of the back window about eighteen inches. The glass was not smashed, but the catch had been forced and there were bits of wood on the floor – she saw those immediately. She walked back to Matthew’s desk, picked up the telephone and dialed the emergency code.

There are many answers to this question. As long as you like, is one. Longer than you think, is another. Everyone has their own opinion about it. Kenneth Clark, famous for the BBC documentary series Civilisation, has his own theory. He claims that the time it takes to look at a picture properly is roughly the time it takes to peel and eat an orange.

There is some evidence of what most people actually do in practice. In summary, if museum- goers are eating oranges, they’re eating them really fast. The Louvre found that although an art lover can spend much more than 30 minutes in front of the Mona Lisa, an ordinary visitor looks at it for about 15 seconds. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art found that on average people look at each work for 29.5 seconds. Another study, conducted by Rutgers University, found that the average time spent on each work of art was 17 seconds. On the universal fruit-attention scale, this is less than dealing with an orange but a little more than the time taken to eat a grape.

There’s another point, too: it’s not just a question of how long we look at a painting, but of the quality of that attention. This is, of course, much harder to quantify. But there’s a profound belief that over the past decade this has changed for the worse.

It is technology that mainly gets the blame. The rise of social networks and the smartphone have allegedly made us fatally incapable of concentration. Nowadays we are more interested in telling people what we are doing than doing it. So, we share our dinner with others on the Internet, instead of with our date. Our novels go unfinished as we flip through 140-character tweets. And when we go to a gallery, we don’t look at the art: we take a selfie with it. Even if art leaves you cold, this argument matters, because if it is true, then so is the broader claim that the 21^st century is leaving us incapable of deep engagement with anything.