You performed better than of students
Your Score | Average of all Users | Percentile | |
---|---|---|---|
Media |
Your score:
Average score:
You performed better than of students
This test has two separate sections, A and B. In this test, we are focusing on Section A and in particular looking at questions on the theme of Media
Section A : Multiple Choice
This section is divided into 12 subsections; each subsection has between 3 and 4 questions.
You should answer all 31 multiple choice questions in section A, selecting one of the possible answers listed for each question.
Once you have completed all 31 questions, you will be presented with an Item Review Screen giving you the opportunity to review your responses. Once you are happy with your responses you should select ‘End Review’ and move to the next review screen.
Time allowed: 70 minutes 06 seconds
Solution Feedback Review
This screen shows all questions and your response as correct or incorrect. You may not change your response.
You may view solutions to each question by selecting the ‘Explain Answer’ button in the top left corner of the question.
The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed
Gaby Hinsliff
Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.
But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.
This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.
Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?
Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.
Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.
Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.
All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.
But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.
The correct answer is A.
The author shows that there are not enough older women in successful working positions and that this is unprincipled and we need to see more older women working successfully to install change
A. This is correct
B. This is too extreme an extrapolation
C. This is also too extreme an extrapolation
D. This is not necessarily part of the author’s argument
E. This could be deduced but it is not the purpose of the author’s work
The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed
Gaby Hinsliff
Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.
But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.
This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.
Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?
Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.
Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.
Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.
All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.
But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.
The correct answer is A.
In order to support her argument that older women are capable of working successfully, the author relies on the fact that women entering middle age were raised to higher standards of expectation and education
A. This is correct
B. This is incorrect, the author says ‘A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men’
C. This is not relevant to the author’s main point
D. This is a very limited example and so does not really support the author’s main point
E. This is true but it is a conclusion not something relied on to support a conclusion
QUESTION TIP! ‘rely’ means that the statement must support, and not merely state, the author’s conclusion
The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed
Gaby Hinsliff
Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.
But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.
This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.
Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?
Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.
Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.
Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.
All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.
But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.
The correct answer is C.
The author’s whole piece rests on the idea that gendered ageism exists and is unjustified
A. The author does not argue that men and women are exactly the same
B. The author does not suggest that older women are the same as younger women
C. Correct
D. The author is likely to agree with this
E. The author explicitly states this
The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed
Gaby Hinsliff
Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.
But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.
This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.
Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?
Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.
Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.
Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.
All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.
But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.
The correct answer is C.
This suggests that it seems some people only think older women are good at ‘judging cakes’, i.e. that their abilities are underestimated and patronised
A. This is not the author’s point
B. The author is making a point beyond Anne Robinson herself
C. Correct
D. This is not the author’s point
E. The purpose is deeper than this
The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed
Gaby Hinsliff
Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.
But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.
This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.
Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?
Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.
Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.
Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.
All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.
But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.
The correct answer is E.
All of the other answers can be found in the text, whereas covid is given as a reason for depreciation in older women working ‘But Covid hit this group hard’
TOP TIP! Recognition can be a helpful tool but before you put an answer down quickly scan nearby text to make sure it is actually the correct answer
The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense
To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.
Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.
The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.
An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.
The correct answer is A.
‘A’ encapsulates the fact that a lot of the text focusses on disproving the arguments put forward for privatisation and that this leads the author to the conclusion that privatisation is not an economically sensible decision
A. This is correct but the author speaks solely of privatisation of Channel 4 and not privatisation in general
B.The author does not give us any information about other things so we cannot conclude that TV channels are unique
C. The author does not suggest it is ‘selfish’ and privatisation being ‘non-sensical’ seems slightly too strong
D. This is the opposite of the author’s argument
TOP TIP! Take care not to read what you want to see into an answer, option B does not mention TV channels or channel 4 and you should be careful not to simply read it as if it said ‘Privatisation of channel 4 is not an economically sensible decision’
The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense
To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.
Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.
The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.
An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.
The correct answer is C.
The word before impetus is ‘renewed’. Force fits best with ‘renewed’ suggesting that there is renewed force behind the movement which push for privatisation
A. Decline is the opposite of renewed so you should rule this option out
B. There is nothing in nearby words to suggest that this is the answer
C. This is the correct answer
D. This does not fit with the sentence, but may be familiar as it is used elsewhere in the text
E. This does not get behind the idea that there is a push for privatisation
QUESTION TIP! For ‘what is the meaning of this word’ questions, you should not begin answering until you have located the word in the text since the context will help you understand the word’s meaning.
The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense
To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.
Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.
The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.
An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.
The correct answer is A.
A. The author disapproves of the privatisation decision and the texts aims to prove that it is nonsensical
B. The author is not disappointed rather critical and disapproving
C. The author uses objective information to support their subjective argument
D. The author uses information to support their argument
E. The author is not discombobulated
The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense
To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.
Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.
The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.
An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.
The correct answer is B.
The author uses a comparison with science to try and get the reader to think about channel 4 in a new light, ultimately supporting the argument that channel 4 should not be privatised
A. The author is not trying to make a point about science, he is using a point about science to make a relevant point about channel 4
B. This is the correct answer
C. The author is not trying to make a point about science, he is using a point about science to make a relevant point about channel 4
D. This is true but does not explain the author’s point
E. This is too extreme a statement
The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense
To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.
Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.
The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.
An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.
The correct answer is D.
This is given as a reason for privatisation not against it. All of the other options can be found within the text.
QUESTION TIP! Don’t ignore the title – it is a part of the text and can give you helpful information
Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics
Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?
I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.
Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.
Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.
And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.
Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”
The correct answer is A.
We can look to the title and the final line of the text to support the idea that A is the author’s main point
A. Correct
B. This is true but it is not the point or purpose of the text
C. This is the opposite of the author’s argument
D. This is true but is not the point or argument
E. This cannot be deduced from the text
Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics
Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?
I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.
Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.
Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.
And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.
Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”
The correct answer is C.
The statement is an analogy, showing that you can enjoy watching films even if you do not agree with an actor’s political views
A. The statement is not a joke
B. The statement is not used to say anything about footballers, rather to make a point about actors who are the subject of the text
C. Correct
D. The statement is not used to say anything about footballers, rather to make a point about actors who are the subject of the text
E. This does not make sense
Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics
Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?
I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.
Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.
Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.
And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.
Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”
The correct answer is A.
The whole point of the text is to express the author’s opinion that you can enjoy films and actor’s work without necessarily agreeing with their political views
A. Correct
B. This is stated in the text
C. This can be inferred from the line ‘. Hollywood is so liberal’
D. The author describes himself as leftist so is likely to agree with this
E. This can be inferred from the text
Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics
Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?
I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.
Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.
Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.
And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.
Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”
The correct answer is C.
The text seems controversial, the author is expressing a somewhat uncommon and unlikeable opinion in the context of today’s culture
A. The text is not primarily informative
B. The text is somewhat personal but this does not express the whole tone
C. Correct
D. The text is not deep
E. The text does not include much analysis
Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics
Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?
I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.
Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.
Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.
And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.
Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”
The correct answer is A.
The author starts by identifying Clint Eastwood as right wing but then goes on to talk about the importance of nuance stating that ‘Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard’
A. Correct
B. Incorrect ‘Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard’
C. Incorrect Clint was described as right wing not left
D. Clint’s views do not appear especially progressive
E. Clint’s views do not appear especially old fashioned, even if they are in the minority
Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse
As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.
There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.
First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.
Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.
Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.
Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.
The correct answer is A.
The author outlines examples of places where ID verification has been implemented and yet racial harassment continues, he is suggesting that ID verification may therefore not be very effective and preventing racial harassment. But, this is not comprehensive data and so this is a suggestion and not an absolutely certain or explicit conclusion.
TOP TIP! Beware of extremes, in order to say something is ‘definitely’ true we need absolutely conclusive evidence and data, if that is absent, it might be that the statement is ‘suggested’ or that the statement is ‘likely’ true
(Edited from an article on The Guardian)
Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse
As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.
There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.
First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.
Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.
Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.
Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.
The correct answer is C.
The author suggests that ID verification is ineffective because it does not deal with the underlying root cause of the problem, and allows ministers to hide the problem rather than fixing it. Hence, he would most likely agree with efforts to fix the root and underlying problem.
A. This hides the problem and does not fix it
B. This hides the problem and does not fix it
C. Correct
D. This might prevent some expressions of racism but again fails to deal with the root problems
E. The author suggests that ID verification will stop the government from dealing with the underlying problem
(Edited from an article on The Guardian)
Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse
As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.
There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.
First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.
Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.
Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.
Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.
The correct answer is B.
The author is making an important point, and trying to educate readers to reconsider efforts to prevent racism.
A. The author is arguing, but it seems this is from a point of education and persuasion rather than angriness and bitterness
B. Correct
C. The text has political elements but the point goes beyond politics
D. The text has legal elements but this does not sum up the main tone of the text
E. The text is serious, but it seems to look forward to changes in the future more than it looks back on the past
(Edited from an article on The Guardian)
Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse
As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.
There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.
First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.
Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.
Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.
Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.
The correct answer is B.
The author says that the problem is the most crude online, but that it is also present and worsened by big newspapers and the actions of government ministers like Priti Patel
(Edited from an article on The Guardian)
Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse
As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.
There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.
First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.
Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.
Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.
Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.
The correct answer is B.
The author is suggesting that it is a mistake to assume that racial harassment is confined to social media. This fits in with the rest of the paragraph, which talks about incidents of racial harassment outside of the digital world like in newspapers.
QUESTION TIP! When asked to determine the meaning of a metaphor, think through the metaphor in isolation first – then head to the text and check that your understanding fits in with the author’s argument in the rest of the passage
(Edited from an article on The Guardian)
I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.
I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.
Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.
Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months.
It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.
Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.
Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”
Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.
This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.
Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.
The correct answer is D.
Diversity schemes are mentioned as something which is not doing enough to help women actually get their TV shows on air. All the other answer options are found in the text.
(Deborah Frances White)
I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.
I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.
Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.
Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months.
It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.
Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.
Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”
Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.
This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.
Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.
The correct answer is B.
The tone of the passage is statistical, the author provides an array of factual evidence to support their argument.
(Deborah Frances White)
I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.
I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.
Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.
Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months.
It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.
Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.
Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”
Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.
This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.
Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.
The correct answer is B.
The author’s main purpose is to inspire change by bringing the issues to the attention of the reader. One piece of evidence that supports this is ‘ Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.’.
(Deborah Frances White)
I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.
I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.
Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.
Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months.
It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.
Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.
Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”
Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.
This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.
Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.
The correct answer is A.
The text says that 13% were original stories written by women, so we need to do 13% x 283,000. Be very careful not to read the question carefully, which asks for the number of original stories written by women not the number of dramas written by women.
(Deborah Frances White)
I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.
I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.
Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.
Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months.
It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.
Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.
Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”
Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.
This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.
Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.
The correct answer is B.
The author mentioned the vote for women movement to inspire the reader to see the resemblances, to push us to learn lessons from the past and to push for change when it is needed.
A. This does not discuss the point of the inclusion
B. Correct
C. This does not make sense
D. This is too extreme
E. Incorrect
(Deborah Frances White)
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is A.
The author’s second paragraph contains different case examples. The thing these examples have in common is a special vulnerability to the shortage and hence this is a focus the author makes in the article.
Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:11:24
The author also focuses on future changes in the later paragraphs. Could it not be argued that the article has more than one focus?
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is D.
This answer can easily be extracted from the lines “Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry”, implying that people tend to oversimplify the cause of shortages when in fact the cause of such events operates on a large scale.
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is A.
A – the relevant lines of the passage are
“Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.”
The author says that some think uncertainty increases support for the left, others that it pushes people towards the right. We cannot definitively say from the text which opinion the author is presenting as right so B and C are ruled out. What we can definitively say is that the author is suggesting there is an influence on politics.
QUESTION TIP ! Take care not to use information in the text to leap to your own conclusions that are suggested, but not certainly implied in the passage
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is A.
The author talks about a cycle, this means as one person panics they cause some other people to panic, and those people individually cause more people to panic etc etc. This is exponential growth of panic such that a small problem grows quickly into a very large problem.
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is E.
E – ‘scarcity mindset’ is clearly a term coined by the author rather than something you are expected to know the meaning of. On checking the passage, you will find it is defined as a “jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely”, hence E is the correct answer.
On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.
The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.
The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)
The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.
But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.
Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.
Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.
The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.
Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.
Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.
Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.
All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.
The correct answer is B.
The author is critical and does make some normative arguments as well as describe the situation. However, these tones are subsidiary to the author’s main tone which is analytical – the point is to review the situation, its causes and its effects with an analytical and thought provoking mindset.
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TI-108