Eindexamen Engels vmbo-gl/tl 2025, tijdvak 1: vragen en antwoorden

On July 2nd avid watchers of the skies celebrate World UFO Day – the anniversary of the supposed crash of a flying saucer near Roswell in 1947. Helpfully, the National UFO Reporting Centre, a non-profit, has catalogued almost 90,000 reported sightings of UFOs, mostly in America, since 1974.

It turns out that aliens are considerate. They seldom disturb earthlings during working hours. Rather, they tend to arrive in the evening, especially on Fridays, when folks are sitting on the front porch nursing their fourth beer, the better to appreciate flashing lights in the heavens.

The state aliens like best is Washington – especially the thinly populated northern part. Other popular destinations are also near the Canadian border, where the Northern lights are sometimes visible. UFOs tend to shun big cities, where there are lots of other lights. They also avoid daylight hours, when people might think they were just aeroplanes.

economist.com, 2014

1 An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware his old TV-set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village's broadband. After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

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5 "We'd just advise the public to make sure that their electric appliances are properly certified and meet current British standards," she said. "And if you have a fault, report it to your service provider in the first instance so that we can investigate."

bbc.com, 2020

1 Market consulting firm P&S Intelligence reports that the Australian micro mobility market – which encompasses both electric and traditional bikes and scooters, as well as electric mopeds and three-wheeled `pods' – generated $16.9m in revenue in 2020. The largest share of that figure was in e-scooter sales, due to their cost effectiveness.

2 But since then a number of these rideable devices, mostly powered by lithium-ion batteries, have burst into flames. Most incidents have occurred with low-quality light electric vehicles (LEVs) while they were charging. EV FireSafe, a body tracking electric vehicle battery fires, found 57 separate incidents worldwide since the start of the year. The project's director Emma Sutcliffe said 13 of those serious incidents occurred in Australia.

3 Ms Sutcliffe said there were three issues with low-quality electric vehicles: they often have poor quality lithium-ion battery cells and battery management systems; they take a beating in normal operation; and they're often stored or charged inside a home or workplace, so there is a higher risk of a fire spreading.

4 Battery packs are made up of a module of smaller battery cells, like a group of traditional AA batteries all working together. If damaged or overcharged, those cells can begin generating heat and internal gas build-up. The heat from the faulty cell spreads to other nearby cells, creating a chain reaction and eventual explosive exothermic reaction as those built up gases burst, catch fire, and vent from the battery module. This process is called a thermal runaway.

5 The Australian Fire Department advises: "Always stick to reputable and compatible lithium-ion battery brands, avoid over-charging and charging devices whilst you're asleep or away from home." Its spokesperson added: "Even high quality lithium-ion batteries are capable of creating a fire risk." 7 , the nation's consumer watchdog is conducting its own investigation into lithium-ion battery fires, with part of the probe focusing on rideables. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released an issues paper on the batteries for consultation last December. A report on the matter is expected to be released by the end of the year.

news.com.au, 2023

By Stuart Layt

1 Researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) have been given a boost in their quest to find out exactly how harmful microplastics are to humans with the launch of a new specialist laboratory. Environmental health expert at UQ, Kevin Thomas, said having the resources to accurately measure nanoparticles of plastic meant they could answer some longstanding questions about their effect on the body. "Plastic is in the environment, and it's a very complicated situation because there are many different types of plastics, and it's further changed in the environment through weathering," he said. "It's a unique challenge because there is a complexity we don't quite understand, but there is already a lot of data to suggest humans are exposed to a lot of plastic particles, so we are trying to quantify what the effect is of that exposure."

2 Microplastics have increasingly invaded the environment over the last few decades, as they come from a range of sources, from plastic products like bottles to fragments of car tyres flaking off on roads. And the problem is growing because the plastics continue to break down into smaller and smaller particles once they are in the environment. They also become concentrated as they go up the food chain, with smaller animals with a small amount of microplastics in their systems being eaten by larger animals who take those microplastics into their systems. Recent studies indicate the average adult human ingests more than 100,000 microplastic particles every day, but it is not yet fully understood what health effects that produces. "There is a lot of previous data to show humans are exposed to particles, and our great challenge is to find out what effect that is having on us," Professor Thomas said.

3 The UQ team has two projects ready to go with the opening of the new centre – the first is to measure the levels of microplastics in blood, urine and brain tissue. The other project is to investigate the behaviour of extremely small microplastics, below 10 micrometres in size, and develop measures to quantify them. To achieve this, the lab does not contain much plastic at all, and is mostly stainless steel to avoid nanoparticles from the lab itself contaminating samples. The research team expected to have initial findings on the projects by the end of the year, after which they will reach out to other institutions around the world for collaborations.

4 The lab has been established thanks to a partnership between UQ and the Minderoo Foundation, a major philanthropic organisation. Sarah Dunlop, the director of the Plastics and Human Health program at the Minderoo Foundation, said the new centre had the capability to do world-first research on nanoplastics. "The research can be compared to looking for something the size of a tennis ball between here and 100 kilometres away," Professor Dunlop said. "It's a huge message in itself, which says just how far this plastic pollution has reached, not only across the planet, but into our bodies. So it's very much about building that global capacity so we can shine the light on the problem and eliminate the harmful effects of plastic on people on the planet."

brisbanetimes.com.au, 2022

by Kristina Murkett

1 It looks like Barbie is having another makeover: last week toy maker Mattel announced that they were launching a range of dolls to honour women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), making miniature models of pioneers such as US healthcare workers Amy O'Sullivan and Dr Audrey Cruz, Canadian doctor and campaigner Dr Chika Stacy Oriuwa, and – of course – Oxford vaccine designer Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert. Of all the awards Gilbert has received this year – a damehood, the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of the Arts, a standing ovation at Wimbledon – I'm sure she is most thrilled by being immortalised as a pant-suited plaything.

2 Whilst I am all for greater representation and diversity in toys designed for girls, I'm not convinced by Barbie's feminist rebrand. It's easy to see this as yet another example of a business trying to make a quick buck through attempting to improve their image; Barbie's sales had been nose-diving but the launch of various `special release' additions (ranging from David Bowie to Rosa Parks) have helped to boost profits. But the idea that swapping Barbie's sequins for a stethoscope will somehow `inspire the next generation of girls into STEM careers' is wishful thinking; at the end of the day, playing with a doll is still playing with a doll.

3 These additions have no impact on broadening girls' career aspirations. Take one study which found that girls are no more likely to consider medicine because they played with Doctor Barbie rather than Fashion Barbie, but girls who played with Barbies in general were more likely to have fewer career choices than girls who played with Mr Potato Head. If parents genuinely want to expose their daughters to careers they may not be aware of, whether that be a vaccinologist or a genetic researcher, then giving them a piece of pretty plastic 17 .

4 Men dominate STEM industries for an array of reasons, but I can guarantee it is not because they played with Astrophysicist Action Man or Statistician Stretch Armstrong. They were, however, more likely to have been given other, more useful toys, like Lego or a toy telescope or a science kit. That's not to say that playing with dolls is inherently bad. Of course, it can help children to develop empathy and social processing skills, and I personally used to happily spend hours playing with figurines (although admittedly these were Pokémon rather than My Little Pony). 19 , let's not pretend that a doll can make a child enthusiastic about engineering.

5 You can hardly blame Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert's rather bemused expression in the promotional photographs – after all, people with such accomplishments normally get large monuments in their likeness, or a Nobel Prize (although only ten women have ever won these in Chemistry or Physics), and it's hard to imagine a male scientist being transformed into a toy. Let's just hope that parents see through this gimmick; if you want your child to be interested in biology, then give them a bug-collecting kit, not a Barbie.

spectator.co.uk, 2021

1 THE RECIPE SOLD itself as "unique." Toward the end of March, an anonymous blonde woman appeared on the TikTok page @foodfuns3 and committed a culinary crime. First, she poured an entire box of angel hair pasta into a blender, then she blitzed it into dust, added a couple of eggs, and rolled the resulting dough into new pasta strips. Eagerly, she took a bite of the thick, grainy pasta after cooking it. She ended the video with the words "Mmm! It's like the perfect consistency." Despite this onscreen bite, it's safe to assume this pasta dish ended up in the bin.

2 It's no longer news that disgusting food videos on TikTok are intentional rage bait, designed to rile up viewers and gain comments, shares, and views for creators. Yet while no one eats the food in these ridiculous recipe videos, they do 23 . Thanks to the sheer number of hideous recipes that now populate TikTok, a new job has emerged on the internet: recipe reactor.

3 Chef Reactions (see photo) is such a recipe reactor. Multiple times a week, Chef Reactions, who has more than 3 million TikTok followers, picks an online recipe video and – it's in the name – reacts to it. He is known for his deadpan delivery and very evident culinary knowledge. (He really is a chef with almost 20 years' experience.) The 40-year-old content creator reacts to everything from genuinely delicious-looking chocolate sculptures to people cooking inside their toilet bowls. His angry reactions are unscripted and authentic: "I come from a background of not wasting food, both in my professional life and my personal life. When I was a kid, I was forced to sit at the kitchen table until I finished everything on my plate, so wasting food is a pet peeve of mine."

4 Chef Reactions created his TikTok account in May 2022 because, he says, "a dishwasher that worked for me had a video go viral ... and it was really stupid, it was maybe the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life." Deciding that if she could do it, he could do it too, the chef created his first video, a silly three-second clip in which he makes eyes at some butt-shaped dough. His channel then grew quickly. He recently quit his job; brand deals, merchandise sales, and supporters enable him to recipe-react full time. "I've been a chef for so long that it's hard for me to think of what I do now as work, because I worked so very hard before," he says. He notes that while he is by no means rich or "set for life," he could afford a year off to be with his family if he stopped making videos right now. "This has changed my life in ways that I never thought were possible," he says.

5 Yet in the year Chef Reactions has been creating his videos, he says the number of rage bait recipes on TikTok has grown. "These accounts are multiplying like gremlins," he says, "And now people say that I'm partially to blame for that." Some viewers believe that gross food creators are making videos specifically for the chef to react to, meaning he's taking the bait and feeding the baiters. While he says it would be "egotistical" for him to believe that videos are made specifically for him, he does acknowledge his part in this strange new environment. "Without them, I wouldn't be where I'm at today, so it's kind of a double-edged sword," he says. Equally: "I'm not the only person that does food reactions."

6 It's unclear how long recipe reactions will continue to be popular. Chef Reactions says, "I think of myself always as on my 14th of 15 minutes of fame." But being uncertain about the future doesn't trouble him too much. "If you were to ask me a year ago what my retirement plan was, I would have said, `Hovering over an empty deep fryer.' I didn't have a retirement plan," he says. He still doesn't, but he does now have a flourishing online career. "If it all goes away tomorrow, I can always fall back onto my skill set and continue being a chef."

wired.com, 2023

By Elizabeth Blair

1 Some 300 young musicians from around the country are in New York for Jazz at Lincoln Center's annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival. They're attending workshops and jam sessions, meeting professional musicians and competing. One of them, Skylar Tang, 16, has already won her award. The San Francisco Bay Area trumpet player is the winner of the Dr. J. Douglas White Composition and Arranging Contest, an honor bestowed on an original composition written and arranged for big bands by a high school student.

2 Tang said the vibe of her winning piece, Kaleidoscope, is kind of "frantic," a bit like her life right now. "There's a lot of stress in the tune. I go to school. I have assessments and tests. Maybe that has something to do with it," she said. It took her about seven months to create her work. Composing for big band is "quite a process," Tang said. As a result of her win, she'll receive $1,000 and a composing and arranging lesson with Grammy winner and longtime Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member, Ted Nash. The orchestra also recorded Tang's piece.

3 To determine the winner, Nash and some others listened for "several factors like the strength of their thematic material, their harmony, their use of the instruments, the overall feeling of the music." All found Tang's entry remarkable for its maturity, Nash said. "You have the melody, you have solos, you have backgrounds, you have a development, sometimes we call it a `shout chorus,'" he said. "She has all of these important elements in the piece, but it's deeply personal as well."

4 Nash is thrilled that students have come from all over the country to participate in the Essentially Ellington Festival. "We have gone through a period where people weren't that interested in big bands," he said. Nash credited Wynton Marsalis, managing and artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, with reversing that trend by "understanding the importance of having an orchestral vision and orchestral voice in jazz."

5 Tang said she's inspired by all kinds of music from different time periods, videos of which she devours on the Internet. Her training began with classical piano when she was a little girl; she started playing in her school jazz bands in sixth grade. She said she "absolutely loves" trumpet player Roy Hargrove and admires contemporary artists like pianist Aaron Parks and drummers and composers Terri Lynne Carrington and Kendrick Scott Oracle. During quarantine, Tang learned how to make split screen videos to share her cover arrangements online. In her cover of Do You Wanna Do Nothing With Me by Lawrence, she plays trumpet, guitar, drums and keyboards. "That's what I love about music. It's about creating. It's about expressing yourself and it's about innovation," she said.

npr.org, 2022

Het volgende fragment komt uit een essay over het lied `You'll Never Walk Alone', dat ooit is geschreven voor een musical maar vooral bekend is geworden in de uitvoering van Gerry & the Pacemakers.

You'll Never Walk Alone...

Fans of Liverpool Football Club almost immediately began to sing the song together during games. Liverpool's legendary manager Bill Shankly told the Pacemakers' 5 lead singer, Gerry Marsden, "Gerry, my son, I have given you a football team, and you have given us a song."

Today, "You'll Never Walk Alone" is etched in wrought iron above the gates of Anfield, Liverpool's stadium. Liverpool's famous Danish defender 10 Daniel Agger has YNWA tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand. I've been a Liverpool fan for decades, and for me the song is so linked to the club that when I hear the opening notes, I think of the times I've sung it with other fans – sometimes in exaltation, often in lamentation.

When Bill Shankly died in 1981, Gerry Marsden sang "You'll Never 15 Walk Alone" at the memorial service – it has been sung at many funerals for many Liverpool supporters. The miracle of "You'll Never Walk Alone" for me is how well it works as a funeral song, and as a high school graduation song, and as a we-just-beat-Barcelona-in the-Champions-League song. As former Liverpool player and manager Kenny Dalglish 20 said, "It covers adversity and sadness and it covers success." It's a song about sticking together even when your dreams are tossed and blown. It's a song about both the storm and the golden sky.

At first blush, it may seem odd that the world's most popular football song comes from musical theater. But football is theater, and fans make it 25 musical theater. The anthem of West Ham United is called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and at the start of each game, you'll see thousands of grown adults blowing bubbles from the stands as they sing, "I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air / They fly so high, nearly reach the sky / Then like my dreams, they fade and die." Manchester United fans refashioned Julia Ward Howe's U.S. Civil War anthem "Battle Hymn of the Republic" into the song "Glory, Glory Man United." Manchester City fans sing "Blue Moon," a 1934 Rodgers and Hart number.

All these songs are made great by the communities singing them. They are assertions of unity in sorrow and unity in triumph: 36 .

from The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green, 2021

1 Creativity can be healing in difficult times, but it's not always easy to tap into those creative juices. Sometimes you're just too overwhelmed and exhausted to write or create. In those times, turning to found poetry – a style of poetry in which you write something new using only what you can find in a text written by someone else – can help.

2 Sometimes when it's hard to write, that limitation gives you a place to start. It's a bit like a painter working with a limited palette: You have both a solid foundation from which to begin your poem, and the challenge to create something using only what you have in front of you.

3 Blackout poetry eliminates the words around a poem you've found within the text to present both a piece of literature and a stark image of that literature on the same page.

4 You may be wondering: Am I really writing a poem if I'm using someone else's work to start? Yes! Writing a good erasure poem requires the poet to intervene on the source text. This means that your poem will say something different than the source text. It will be representative of your voice and your narrative.

5 39 : In an erasure poem, you can only use the words that appear in the article you've chosen, and you have to use them in the order they appear. How you erase the words around your poem is up to you.

nytimes.com, 2021

Street art has become mainstream. There are still those taggers that venture out onto the train tracks at night to scrawl their names across abandoned signal boxes but street art has become so much more. Incredible murals are appearing in our streets, street artists are becoming household names and their work is beginning to sell in auction houses throughout the world.

Here are some facts to get you even more clued up about street art.

1 Street artists have to take on some incredible physical feats when they attempt to create vast murals. Scaling tower blocks, bridges and derelict buildings means they risk breaking their bones as much as athletes and football players. Added to this, they are using the most toxic of materials to display their art: spray paint. This can cause respiratory problems, make their eyes stream and the paint can imbed deep into their fingernails. Who said Banksy wasn't committed to his art?

2 Although there are many intricate and beautiful pieces of street art that have taken days, and in some instances, weeks to create, there are also throw ups. These are the graffiti equivalent of speed dating. In under three minutes, artists want to have got something up on a wall, lamp post or building so they create a throw up.

3 Spray paint cans back in the 1980s were very much standard. Now spray paint is being made specifically for street artists and the better the quality, the higher the price. Different colours and smaller nozzles give artists more freedom to create finer details and use a greater colour palette.

4 Street art all over the world is popping up in reaction to world events. During the campaigning for the EU Referendum, a huge mural of a kissing USA President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in the streets of Bristol. Street artists use their creations to explore political ideals and comment on society. Street art is becoming the perfect vehicle for political messages, satire and propaganda. The audience is huge. After all, everyone who walks down the street sees it.

5 The transient nature of street art can be tricky to understand if you are not an artist. Incredible murals that have taken so much effort and time and passion to create may not be there the next time you visit. This might be because it is deemed vandalism and is cleaned away by the council or it could have been stolen or it may have been removed to be sold. You would imagine this being devastating to the artist who has invested so much into their creation but they are surprisingly accepting of it.

graffitify.co.uk, 2019

You've heard of the butterfly effect – now there's the `Peppa Pig effect'. The Channel 5 cartoon follows the adventures of female pig Peppa and her family who live in a town full of other animal families. It first aired in 2004 and airs in the USA on Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. Peppa speaks with a slow-paced, some might say, cute middle-England accent and the impact of her speech has clearly rubbed off on youngsters across the Atlantic.

Mike Lupa said on Twitter: `Anyone else's kids developing a slight British accent after watching Peppa Pig? She is also snorting like a piggy, but that is expected.' Meanwhile mother@_fragilebxnes said: `I'd like to thank Peppa Pig for the slight yet adorable British accent my toddler is acquiring. #mum #mummy.'

The response has actually been quite positive from our American cousins who have also noticed Peppa's occasional snorting being made by their youngsters when they speak. Dr Emma Byrne, who is the author of Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, told the millennial mums' website Romper, that the snorting is actually `really smart' and would be the toddler equivalent of using swear words or expressing emotions. But she did say the children would eventually grow out of it.

metro.co.uk, 2019