Eindexamen Engels vmbo-gl/tl 2024, tijdvak 1: vragen en antwoorden

Musical Bridge

You might’ve heard of the concept of a “bridge” in music. Well, guitarist Nate Mercereau is taking that term literally. In July, he released a new album in collaboration with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge

• yes, you read that right
• titled Duets / Golden Gate Bridge, which features droning guitar improvisations over the eerie hum of the Bay Area landmark.

Mercereau says he first heard about the sound through a San Francisco Chronicle article that delved into how residents have been complaining about it. But when Mercereau heard recordings of the sound, which is produced by wind passing through the slats of the bridge, he was immediately struck by its beauty. “It’s remarkably musical,” Mercereau says. “It plays multiple notes.”

In May, Mercereau, who’s worked as a session musician with Jay-Z, Leon Bridges and more, was joined by engineer Zach Parkes and photographer Minea Bisset and together they trekked down to the Marin Headlands by the bridge and spent two days recording duets with its hum. Mercereau weaves low, slow melodies around the bridge’s tones, which he likens to singing bowls from the Asian country Tibet.

npr.org, 2021

World’s unluckiest burglars by Rob Picheta

1 Two hapless burglars have been arrested in the UK after pocket-dialing the police during their crime. Chief Inspector John Owen labeled the thieves the “world’s unluckiest burglars” and likened them to the ill-fated 4-1 in the movie “Home Alone”.

2 “I think we have just arrested the world’s unluckiest burglars,” he wrote on Twitter. “Whilst committing a burglary one of the bungling burglars accidentally sat on his phone & rang 999. We received a call detailing all of their 4-2 up to the point of hearing our patrols arrive to arrest them.”

3 Adding insult to injury, Owen included a gif of the “Home Alone” character Marv, who proves comically unsuited to a life of crime in the Macaulay Culkin Christmas movie.

4 In 2016, two equally unfortunate robbers held up a McDonald’s in France, only to discover that 11 4-3 of an elite paramilitary force happened to be eating inside.

edition.cnn.com, 2021

Medieval tunnel

1 A routine excavation yielded something surprising when crews unearthed a mysterious medieval tunnel in Wales. It didn’t appear on any Ordnance Survey map, but when technicians in the Wye Valley near Wales’ famed Tintern Abbey were called to remove an electrical pole, they found something unexpected.

2 Allyn Gore, the technician for Western Power Distribution working on the project, said, “I had a phone call about two hours into the work … they said, ‘Allyn, we’ve found a cave.’” The digging had revealed a small opening tucked beneath a cluster of rocks and nearly obscured by vines. Caves aren’t unusual in the Wye Valley. But when they looked a little closer, Gore and his team realised it wasn’t a cave at all. They had found a stone tunnel.

3 “When we got there, and we’d seen that part of the side of the banking had caved in, you could see straight away that it was something that was man-made,” said Gore. The tunnel followed a route along the Anghidi River towards Tintern Abbey, the 12th-Century abbey built by Cistercian monks. “It was underneath a public footpath, a huge number of people had been walking over it forever how long that footpath had been there and no-one knew what they were walking on top of,” said Western Power Distribution wayleave officer Luke Summers. Western Power Distribution called in Cadw, the Welsh historic monuments body. Cadw estimated the tunnel to have been built around the 14th Century. The energy firm stopped the project to allow for proper archaeological investigation.

4 Though an adult couldn’t walk upright

• footage of the section shows a space about 4ft in height
• the arching stonework tunnel appears to be large enough to have allowed people to move undetected through the countryside. Draped in cobwebs and stippled with puddles, the tunnel yielded few of its secrets in the initial exploration. It will take more investigation to accurately date the hidden historical structure and to determine just what this mysterious subterranean passage might have been used for.

bbc.com, 2021

Brazil announces equal pay on national football teams

1 Brazil’s football federation announced it will pay men and women the same amount for representing the national team, one of the few countries to make such a pledge. It means Brazil’s little-known female players such as Marta, Formiga and Leticia Santos will receive the same fees and allowances as global superstars such as Neymar, Gabriel Jesus and Roberto Firmino. Australia, Norway and New Zealand were amongst the nations to previously decide to pay their men and women internationals the same amount. In March 2019, the US women’s team, the current world champions, sued their federation for discrimination over pay and conditions. A judge dismissed their case but the team appealed.

2 Brazil’s football federation said its decision was communicated to the women’s team and their Swedish coach Pia Sundhage in March. “This is historic. Being a part of this is very special, I’m very grateful,” said Sundhage, who also welcomed the news that for the first time a woman, Duda Luizelli, has been put in charge of coordinating the national women’s team.

3 The measure will be applied to the national teams participating in the Olympic Games, as well as the next men’s and women’s World Cup tournaments. “It will be proportionally the same as what FIFA proposes for women, that is to say, there will be no more gender difference in remuneration between men and women,” said Caboclo, the federation president.

4 The men’s team is the most successful in football, having won the World Cup a record five times. They have also won their continental championship, the Copa America, nine times, most recently on home soil in 2019. But the women’s team is also amongst the strongest in the game, having reached the World Cup final in 2007 and back-to-back Olympic finals in 2004 and 2008.The Brazilian football federation said later in a statement that equal pay was 12 equality in football, the most popular sport in the country, which has 36 professional clubs. Last year, the Brazilian professional league also authorised equal prize money for women and men.

5 13 , when it comes to club football, the gap in pay between men and women, not just in Brazil but all over the world, remains huge. The highest paid players in the women’s game earn six-figure salaries, while male players such as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo take home sums more than 100 times greater.

batimes.com, 2020

Whistled Language Echoes Around This Island

1 Sitting atop a cliff in the Canary Islands, Antonio Márquez Navarro issued an invitation — “Come over here, we’re going to slaughter the pig” — without speaking a word: He whistled it. In the distance, three visiting hikers stopped dead in their tracks at the piercing sound and its echo bouncing off the walls of the ravine that separated them. Mr. Márquez, 71, said that in his youth, when local shepherds rather than tourists walked the steep and rugged footpaths of his island, his news would have been greeted right away by a responding whistle, loud and clear.

2 But his message was lost on these hikers, and they soon resumed their trek on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic that is part of Spain. Mr. Márquez is a proud guardian of La Gomera’s whistling language, which he called “the poetry of my island.” And, he added, “like poetry, whistling does not need to be useful in order to be special and beautiful.”

3 With its 18 , it’s easy to see why whistling came into use on the Canaries; on most of the islands, deep ravines run from high peaks and plateaus down to the ocean, and plenty of time and effort are required to travel even a short distance overland. Whistling developed as a good alternative way to deliver a message, with its sound carrying farther than shouting — as much as two miles across some canyons and with favorable wind conditions.

4 In 2009, La Gomera’s whistled language, officially known as Silbo Gomero, was added by UNESCO to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But with whistling no longer essential for communication, Silbo’s survival mostly relies on a 1999 law that made teaching it an obligatory part of the island’s school curriculum.

5 Interpreting a whistle isn’t always easy but making the correct sounds can be even harder. Most whistlers insert one bent knuckle into the mouth, but some use instead the tip of one or two fingers, while a few use a finger from each hand. “The only rule is to find whichever finger makes it easier

to whistle, and sometimes unfortunately nothing works at all,” said Francisco Correa, who is a fluent whistler. “There are even some older people who have understood Silbo perfectly since childhood, but never got any clear sound to come out of their mouth.”

6 As is the case in many languages, whether whistled or not, there is a generation gap on La Gomera. Ciro Mesa Niebla, a 46-year-old farmer, said he struggled to whistle with a younger generation trained at school because, he said, “I’m a mountain guy who learned at home to whistle the words our family used to farm, but I don’t have the vocabulary of these kids who learn salon whistling, which is a bit too fancy for me.”

7 The students don’t always have much opportunity to practice Silbo outside of school. In the class of 6-year-olds, only five of 17 raised their hands when asked if they had a chance to whistle at home. “My brother actually can whistle really loudly, but he won’t show me, because he is either on his PlayStation or out with friends,” complained one of the youngsters, Laura Mesa Mendoza. Still, there are teenagers who welcome the chance to chat without many of the adults around them understanding. Some had parents who went to school before acquiring Silbo became mandatory, or who settled on the island as adults.

8 However much she is attached to her cellphone, Erin Gerhards, 15, is another example of someone keen to improve her whistling and help safeguard the traditions of her island. “It is a way to honor the people that lived here in the past,” she said. “And to remember where everything came from, that we didn’t start with technology, but from simple beginnings.”

adapted from chicagotribune.com, 2021

Kong’s calling card

by JASON BITTEL

1 Since King Kong first appeared on the silver screen in 1933, the fictional giant ape has exposed audiences all over the world to a very real gorilla behavior

• chest-beating. “It is 21 ,” says Edward Wright, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It can be a bit frightening. You don’t want to get in the way.”

2 Mountain gorillas live in tight-knit family groups led by silverback males, whose authority is constantly being challenged by other males. By advertising their size, mating status, and fighting ability via sounds that can travel long distances through thick rainforests, the silverbacks are signaling would-be challengers that they better think again before starting a ruckus.

3 To study the behavior in never-before-seen detail, Wright and his colleagues spent more than 3,000 hours observing endangered mountain gorillas at Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. While battling biting insects and navigating the park’s rugged, mountainous terrain, the scientists observed more than 500 chest beats from 25 different males between 2014 and 2016. They stayed at a safe distance from the animals, which have been accustomed to the presence of researchers but remain highly vulnerable to human diseases.

4 The results showed that the biggest mountain gorillas produced sounds with lower frequencies than smaller gorillas

• possibly because bigger gorillas have larger air sacs near their larynx. This means that chest- beating isn’t just a visual display, but what the study calls an “honest signal of competitive ability”. Although previous studies showed that a gorilla’s body size is linked to dominance and reproductive success, the idea that chest-beating also communicates some of that information remained speculative. “We thought and suspected it, but there was no actual data to support this claim,” says Roberta Salmi, a primatologist and director of the Primate Behavioral Ecology Lab at the University of Georgia, who is unaffiliated with the research. “I was happy to finally see those results.”

5 Though chest-beating is common in movies and other pop culture portrayals, there’s still plenty we get wrong about the behavior. For starters, real-life gorillas don’t strike their chests with balled up fists. Rather, they cup their hands, which amplifies the sounds. By cupping their hands they ensure that the thumps can be heard more than half a mile away. Silverbacks beat their chests most often when females under their protection are most ready to mate. But it’s not like males are banging on the drum all day, as they’re often portrayed doing in movies.

6 Though gorillas are equipped with gigantic muscles and long canine teeth, the animals come to blows only rarely. Wright believes this is at least partly because chest-beating allows males to size each other up without getting physical. “Even if you’re likely to win a fight, there is still quite a high-risk factor,” he says. “These are large, powerful animals that can do a lot of damage.” To smaller males, the sound of a silverback’s chest-beat may discourage them from approaching. 27 , a silverback may hear the beats made by a smaller male nearby and decide that he’s too puny to bother with.

7 Because chest-beat peak frequency syncs up with body size

• which is itself linked to dominance and reproductive success
• female gorillas have plenty of reasons to listen in on the displays, too. Particularly impressive chest-beating might lure females away to a nearby group like a siren’s song, though this has not yet been studied. Considering the new study’s results, the next step is to see how other gorillas use the information encoded in chest-beating sounds, Salmi says. “It will be very interesting to see how hearing chest beats in their environments might affect their movements and decision-making as to which areas of their home range to use.”

nationalgeographic.com, 2021

Miso1) maker creates cricket soy sauce

1 Following the success of its bug-based miso1) seasoning, Noda Miso Syoten Limited Partnership Corp. released soy sauce created from crickets.

2 The idea for the products came after Yoshinari Noda, 36, president of Noda Miso Syoten, started giving miso-making classes around five years ago. A student asked him if he could create miso from bugs. Noda, an avid traveler who had tried insects overseas, found the bugs rich in protein, like soybeans, so using them instead of beans would make no difference.

3 In 2018, he produced miso from crickets and grasshoppers. The following year, Noda presented soup flavored with the insect miso at an event for young entrepreneurs. There, he met an official from Antcicada, a restaurant in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward that is famous for its cricket ramen2). Antcicada was already considering creating soy sauce with crickets, 30 it asked Noda to work together on the new product.

4 The two-spotted cricket, which has a “strong savory and aromatic flavor,” and the house cricket, characterized by its “delicate and elegant taste,” were used. These crickets were turned into powder and treated with rice malt and salt in wooden buckets at Noda Miso Syoten. No soybeans were used in the production.

5 A 100-milliliter bottle of the soy sauce uses 480 crickets and carries a price tag of 1,640 yen ($15.67) after tax. It is relatively expensive because crickets are 10 to 20 times more costly than soybeans, according to Noda. If wider insect consumption leads to increased cricket production, the price could be lowered.

6 Eating insects has been seen as a way to resolve world hunger problems because bugs are full of nutrients and require less land and water compared with animals. “Insects are the most familiar species on Earth and make up an overwhelming proportion of living creatures both in types and numbers,” Noda said. “Their potential is high as a new edible material.” He continued, “The soy sauce’s taste can be realized only with

crickets. Soybeans may be much cheaper and easier to process, but I want to show how impressive these unknown tastes are.”

7 The cricket soy sauce is available at Noda Miso Syoten and the shopping site of Antcicada at https://antcicada.shop. The company is preparing 400 bottles for release early next year.

adapted from asahi.com, 2020

noot 1 miso = een sojabonenpasta die gebruikt wordt voor sauzen, bij groenten en soep

noot 2 ramen = gerecht van noedels op smaak gebracht met bouillon en miso

James Vickery: R’n’B artist with one deaf ear

1 Behind James Vickery’s left ear is a tiny tattoo, barely noticeable until he turns to point it out. The inking is of a mute icon, a small speaker with a cross next to it, as you would see on a computer or a phone when switching the volume off; a simple image that neatly symbolises the 27-year-old’s story.

2 In and out of hospital with ear infections as a child, he was eventually, at the age of eight, diagnosed with a growth of abnormal skin cells called a cholesteatoma. His case was severe, doctors said, and his eardrum had to be removed. Surgery went well, but inevitably left Vickery completely deaf in that ear. Unable to distinguish the volume and pitch of his voice, he struggled with his speech and a vocal coach was brought in to help. It was through these sessions he found his voice; not just in conversation, but the distinctive, soulful singing voice that has now seen him hailed as a new face of UK R’n’B.

3 “My parents took me to a vocal coach and they wanted me to learn how to basically speak again,” he tells Sky News. “A good way is actually by singing because it engages your diaphragm. So we did that and my singing teacher was like, ‘you can sing, you can actually sing well’. I was really unconfident because no one could ever hear me speak and so credit to my vocal coach, she really taught me how to not only speak louder, but become a bigger person, you know, really fill the room with your voice. That’s something I try and have now in my songs. All the singers I looked up to as a kid had big voices so I always wished I had one.”

4 His debut album, Songs That Made Me Feel, aims to do just what its title says. “The way that people consume music is so passive now,” he says. “It’s so easily accessible but I think not enough people just sit down and let the music take over. I feel like, as a man growing up, men are taught not to show how they feel, I think. You’re taught ‘man up’.” Men don’t talk about their feelings enough, he says. “I managed to be able to do that through song, luckily, by bringing out this soulful album.”

5 …

adapted from news.sky.com, 2021

Judge John Hodgman on the Family Netflix Account By John Hodgman

Ella writes: We have a family Netflix account. I am 18, but every time I switch my profile to allow TV-MA (mature) shows, my dad changes it back. Please order him to let me watch all kinds of shows!

Judge John Hodgman replies: Nothing magical happens when a child turns 18. And that’s why your dad should have figured out years ago that you are a whole human being with a deep inner life who deserves respect and agency. He may argue, “My house, my rules,” but you can tell him that’s just what the Front Man would say about the Squid Game (a show you can watch now). If you have the means, you could buy your own Netflix account. 39 : the only thing his censorship has done is drive you to write to a weird 50-year- old fake judge. Is that what he wants for his little girl? You’ll both be happier if he lets go and trusts your judgment, as the actual law now requires.

nyti.ms, 2021

Question: We noticed a wild rabbit in our yard and would like to put out carrots and fruit for it but wonder if that’s the right thing to do?

Answer: We generally do not recommend feeding wild mammals. It can often lead to problems for them as they very quickly adapt to humans and become reliant on your hospitality. Putting out vegetables and fruits could also attract other less desirable animals thereby creating problems for you. The best way to entice rabbits and other wildlife to your garden is to create a welcoming environment by including aspects of their natural habitat in your yard.

Rabbits prefer woody and shrubby areas. If you would like to increase shelter for rabbits you can easily add a brush pile. You can also plant more shrubs if necessary.

In the summer rabbits eat mostly grasses and weeds, such as goldenrod, wild strawberries, dandelions, and clover. To provide food for them, don’t cut your lawn too short, allow some weeds to grow, and let a corner of your garden go a bit wild with longer grass, weeds and/or wildflowers.

In winter, rabbits turn to the bark, twigs, and buds of shrubs and young trees. 41 , they can do a lot of damage to your garden. If you’re worried about any particular plants, you can protect them with hardware cloth or chicken wire. To provide rabbits with a winter food source, place any branch trimmings from fall pruning on the ground for them.

cwf-fcf.org, 2021

Headless Statue In Sacramento

SACRAMENTO — The statue of a 19th-century Northern California rancher and meat-packing magnate was decapitated earlier this week, leaving investigators in the state’s capital city scratching their heads to find a motive behind the vandalism.

Tipsters could receive a $1,000 reward for information about what befell the nearly century-old granite statue of Charles Swanston in Sacramento’s William Land Park on Monday. The severed head was found on the ground nearby. Police are investigating whether the vandal

• or vandals
• had a beef with the Swanstons or if it was a random act.

Swanston traveled west from Ohio as part of the California Gold Rush and quickly realized he’d make more money as a butcher, according to Sacramento City Historian Marcia Eymann. Swanston then became a rancher and started a meat-packing business that made him rich. His son in the 1920s commissioned the statue, which is part of a fountain, and donated it to the city after Swanston’s death in 1911 at 101 years old.

Eymann said if not for his son’s donation, the city would likely have never put up a piece for Swanston. “Not that anybody knows who he is, but that’s something very special that Sacramento had and now it’s destroyed,” she said.

huffpost.com, 2022

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