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

A. In 1848, the Niagara Falls were already a tourist attraction, and villages had grown up on both the U.S. and Canadian sides of the river to accommodate the crowds of sightseers. But on March 29^th, shortly before midnight, a farmer who had gone out for a stroll noticed that something was wrong. When he went to the edge of the Niagara River, he saw hardly any water. At dawn on March 30^th, people awoke to an unusual silence. The mighty Niagara was just a trickle. Fish were dying. Turtles and other creatures living in the river were clumsily working their way through the mud. People walked on the exposed river bed, eager to discover what had been hidden below the water surface, ignoring the fact they might be swept away if the water suddenly started flowing. They picked up old daggers and tomahawks as souvenirs.

B. No one knew why the falls had stopped flowing. The telegraph was still a new invention. Railroads already served towns on both sides of the river, but the tracks were unreliable, and Buffalo, the nearest big city, was three hours away even when the trains ran on time. Yet it was from Buffalo that the first news about the problem eventually arrived. It turned out that strong southwest winds had pushed huge chunks of ice to the north-eastern tip of Lake Erie which blocked the water flow and created an ice dam.

C. When water stopped flowing on March 29^th, people started coming from nearby cities and towns to see what had happened. No water flowed over the falls all day on March 30^th and throughout the daylight hours of March 31^st. But that night, a distant low-pitched noise came from upriver. It got nearer and louder. Suddenly, a wall of water came down the upper Niagara River and over the falls with a giant thunder. The river was running again.

Airports are torture chambers if you’re claustrophobic. It’s not just the threat of the ride ahead – being stuffed into seats like sardines and then catapulted through the air in a narrow metal tube – but also the terminals themselves, the crowds of people, all the motion and noise, and the whole thing sealed off by glass windows like some kind of a horrible ant farm. This is just one of the many things that Hadley is trying not to think about as she stands before the ticket counter. She can feel something miserable inside her. Part of it is the flight to London awaiting her and part of it is the airport itself, but to make matters worse there is the realisation that she’ll now be late for the wedding she didn’t even want to go to in the first place, and something about this sad little twist of fate makes her feel like crying.

She’s spent the past few weeks secretly wishing this very thing might happen, though admittedly, her fantasy scenarios have been a bit more dramatic: a massive airline strike; an epic hailstorm; a failure of all of the plane’s engines. All perfectly good reasons why she might have to miss her father’s walk down the aisle to marry a woman she’s never met. But being late for your flight seems just a little too convenient, maybe a bit suspicious, and Hadley isn’t at all sure that father will understand that it wasn’t her fault.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” one of the gate attendants says. “There’s nothing we can do but try to get you on the evening flight.” Hadley nods her head. The attendant is now working the keyboard of her computer with a kind of violent intensity, punching at the keys.

“You’re in luck,” she says. “There is one free seat available.”

Hadley is almost afraid to pose the question, but she asks it anyway, “What time does it reach its destination?”

“Nine fifty-four, tomorrow morning.”

Hadley pauses for a moment and says, “I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

“Boarding will start from this gate at seven-thirty tonight and the plane leaves at eight-fifteen,” the attendant says, handing over the papers, which are all neatly bound in a little jacket.

Hadley goes towards the windows and examines the rows of grey chairs, most of them occupied. She puts her backpack on top of her carry-on suitcase. The smell of butter from a nearby pretzel stand is making her slightly sick. She wishes she could just call off her flight, take a taxi and go home but she knows she can’t do it. She also knows that it’s a holiday weekend so there won’t be any other free seats, and the weather maps on the TV screens show a whirling pattern of storms approaching. There are suitcases on empty chairs, families camped out around corners, greasy McDonald’s bags scattered across the floor. Finally, she spots an empty seat and she hurries in that direction.

Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories and old wives’ tales. I’ve heard it all. Nothing, however, frustrates me more than the myths about cockpit automation – this widespread view that in some not-too-distant future pilots will not be necessary on the plane at all. This nonsense is constantly in the news and millions of people actually believe it. It’s true that processors and electronic control systems allow pilots to fly ‘hands off’ just after take-off, continuing through the flight route and – in very rare cases – all the way through to landing. But that doesn’t mean the planes actually fly themselves.

Of course, the technology can help but it should be the pilot who decides how and when to use it. During his famous ‘miracle on the Hudson’ emergency landing in 2009, Capt. Chesley Sullenberger had the backup of the computer autopilot. He was in the pilot’s seat when Airbus A320 collided with a flock of geese and lost thrust 2,700 feet over Manhattan. Computer-assisted flight systems were active but there was no need for them. In fact, flight control computers actually posed a problem for Sullenberger because the flight software interfered with his efforts and thus prevented him from keeping the plane’s nose a little higher during the last four seconds before he brought US Airways Flight 1549 down in the icy Hudson River. “We hit harder than we would have if I had been able to keep the nose up,” he said.

During a normal flight, there’s no way to know when your pilots are using computer-programmed automatic flight systems but one thing is sure: hands-on flying hasn’t disappeared and it won’t do so in the near future.