Język angielski, matura 2022 - poziom rozszerzony - pytania i odpowiedzi

I shall never forget the day I met gorillas for the first time. In the middle of an African forest I suddenly heard high-pitched screams in the air. They were followed by a series of sharp pok-pok chest-beats from a great silverback male hidden behind a dense wall of vegetation.

When I actually saw the gorillas, I froze and remained still until the echoes of the screams and chest-beats faded. The group must have been resting and sunbathing. I could distinguish a few black, furry-headed creatures staring back at me. Their bright eyes moved nervously as they attempted to determine if I was a friend or an enemy. The females looked tense. They had moved with their infants to the back of the group, leaving the silverback leader and some younger males in the foreground. Occasionally, the dominant male would rise to chest-beat in an attempt to frighten me away.

I desperately wanted to take a photo of them, so I decided to climb a tree, not one of my better talents. The tree was smooth and slippery and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get more than a metre above the ground. I was as noisy as a flock of birds in the migration season so the gorillas went back and hid in the thick forest. I was about to give up when Sanwekwe, my African guide, came to my aid by giving me a mighty push upwards. He was shaking with silent laughter while I felt as helpless as a baby taking its first steps. Finally, I pulled myself up onto a branch about six metres above the ground.

By this time I assumed that the noise I had made must have frightened the gorillas onto the next mountain. But to my surprise, the entire group had returned and were watching me like front-row spectators at a circus. All that was needed to make the image complete were a few bags of popcorn and some cotton candy! All the members of the group had revealed themselves because it was obvious to them that the intruder had been distracted by tree-climbing problems, an activity they could understand. I took out my camera, and that’s how probably one of the most publicized pictures of gorillas in the wild was taken. It shows a lineup of sixteen gorillas posing as if for a family photo in a back garden.

Immediately after President Truman announced Japan’s surrender in World War II, at 7:03 p.m. on August 14, 1945, amid the crowds celebrating victory in Times Square, an American sailor shared a passionate kiss with a nurse who was passing by. Or, at least, that’s how the story went.

In fact, as reported by the New York Times in 2010, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo “The Kiss” might have been taken hours earlier. Gloria Bullard, who was in Times Square that day, claimed that she had seen the pair who were in the photograph kiss. However, in her eighties, when interviewed by the New York Times, she said that she had returned home on August 14 by dusk. As her house was 40 miles from Times Square, a long train ride away, she can’t have been in New York as late as 7 p.m.

There were also some other doubts as to the circumstances in which the photo was taken. Online comments under the New York Times article pointed to a distinctive shadow that appears on one of the buildings in the photo, cast by another building, now identified as the Astor Hotel. Three academics set out to examine the length and direction of that shadow to determine the time the photo was taken. They found out that the sun must have been “at azimuth 270 degrees and at an altitude of +22.7 degrees” in order to create such a shadow. It could only have achieved that position on the day in question at 5:51 p.m., much earlier than when the victory was announced.

Although the scientists’ detective work didn’t solve the mystery of the kissing couple’s identity, it helped to eliminate dozens of people who had claimed to have been in the photo. The photographer himself had tried to establish the couple’s identity, and in 1979, he announced that he had found the long-lost nurse. For the next thirty years, Edith Shain was thought to be the woman in the photo. But Eisenstaedt’s attempts to determine the sailor’s identity failed. It was Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi who provided ultimate proof of the identity of the couple in their book The Kissing Sailor. They identified the man in the photo as George Mendonsa and excluded Edith Shain as the nurse he kissed. They concluded without any doubt that the woman was Greta Zimmer, a dental assistant from Queens. Why did Edith Shain claim to be the nurse who was kissed? It’s hard to say. The most credible explanation is simply that she wanted her moment in the limelight. Can we be sure that the last word about the mysterious photo has been said?