Eindexamen Engels vmbo-gl/tl 2026, tijdvak 2: vragen en antwoorden

Accounts of UFO encounters showcased in exhibition

Accounts of apparent UFO encounters have been made public in a new exhibition. Photographer Alexander Ward is behind the Apex exhibition at Suffolk Aviation Heritage Museum in Kesgrave. “Some people I spoke to had just seen a light in the sky, but others had really significant and sometimes traumatic experiences,” he said. Mr Ward has been interested in the subject since he was a teenager when he had his own potential alien encounter.

“I saw a triangle in the sky when I was 17. I’ve always been open to the subject, but I didn’t want to steer this project in one way or another. I want people who come along to the exhibition to make up their own minds,” he said. Mr Ward said he wanted to tell the human experiences behind the strange encounters, rather than proving or disproving them. “I really wanted to understand how people had these experiences and how it changed their view of the world. I wanted to do their experiences justice,” he said.

He spent a lot of time reassuring his subjects that he was not intending to make fun of them. “Many photographers have tried to make a mockery of this subject in the past, so a big part of it was gaining their trust.”

Mr Ward said the project had convinced him of the existence of extraterrestrial life. “We all have our lines in the sand in our mind of what we are prepared to believe in and this project has really shifted that. We are such a tiny grain of sand compared to the vastness of the universe and it would be very strange if we were on our own,” he added.

The exhibition is being held in an old Cold War bunker at the Aviation Museum, which was involved in one of the most famous purported UFO sightings in history at Rendlesham forest.

bbc.com, 2022

Catastrophe?

Councillors in the Western Australian city Fremantle backed a motion which, if approved, could see cats banned from all city-owned and managed property unless they’re on a leash. The motion was put forth in

a meeting earlier this week. The move to begin amending the Cat Management Local Law 2020 in such a way could see the cats prohibited from roads, to save them from being hit by vehicles, too.

Councillor Adin Lang, who put forward the motion, told Perth Now: ‘In the 1970s dogs would roam our streets and I expect roaming cats will also become a thing of the past. While we have prohibited areas in our natural bushland areas, cats are still entering.’ He added that native verge gardens act as ‘animal shelter’ and called the proposal a practical step to protect the local wildlife.

Feral cats, which roam in more than 99.9% of the country’s landmass, have for a long while been a concern for the Australian government. A federal report from last year revealed that feral cats are seen to be a potential threat to 74 mammal species and sub-species, 40 birds, 21 reptiles and four amphibians. It added that feral cats are responsible for the loss of 1.4 billion native animals every year.

dailymail.co.uk, 2021

The “Carrot Myth”

According to conventional wisdom, eating lots of carrots will magically enhance your vision! While there is a little bit of truth in this, the “Carrot Myth” was engineered by British Intelligence and popularized and reinforced by the British Ministry of Information – the government department responsible for publicity and propaganda – during WWII.

During the 1940 Blitzkrieg¹⁾, the Luftwaffe²⁾ often struck and bombarded London under the cover of darkness. In order to make it more difficult for the German planes to hit targets, the British Government issued city-wide blackouts. The Royal Air Force (RAF) were able to repel German fighters in part because of the development of a new secret radar technology. The new on-board radar technology was invented and first used by the RAF in 1939 and had the ability to pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. To protect their secret weapon, British Intelligence invented a propaganda campaign that claimed that British pilots could see in the dark because they ate a lot of carrots!

There is no denying the fact that carrots, by virtue of their heavy dose of vitamin A (in the form of Beta Carotene) are very good for the health of your eyes; 6 by granting carrots the “superpower” of improving your night vision and give you the power to spot enemy planes in the dark! The truth is that eating carrots does not help you see better in the dark any more than eating blueberries will turn you blue. That said, the carrot campaign of subterfuge helped hide a new technology that was critical to the Battle of Britain, a major campaign fought entirely by air forces and the first defeat of Hitler’s military forces, and to the eventual Allied victory.

laidbackgardener.blog, 2019

noot 1 Blitzkrieg: Duits voor ‘bliksemoorlog’ en dit verwijst naar de onverwachte aanvallen van Duitsland in de Tweede Wereldoorlog noot 2 Luftwaffe: veelgebruikte naam voor de Duitse luchtmacht

Why do we have school meals?

Mashed potato, gravy, custard. When British people hear the words “school dinners”, it’s not always great memories that come to mind. That’s not the case for everyone. Indeed France is known for its gourmet school lunches cooked by onsite chefs – bon appétit! But in the UK people have been complaining about school meals for a long time. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver campaigned against cheap processed foods like “turkey twizzlers” in the early 2000s. And Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s prime minister in the late 1970s, was nicknamed the “milk snatcher” when she was education secretary because she stopped free milk for children in schools.

Free school meals have long been used as a measure of poverty. Children are eligible if they come from families with low incomes or if they receive certain benefits. The provision of free school meals has become particularly significant as levels of child poverty in the UK have risen. The issue of free school meals and school meals more broadly has also been the subject of controversy over recent years, with concerns raised about the adequacy of the meals provided and the nutritional quality of the food served.

But problems with school meals go back much further. In fact, they started when the government first began offering meals to school children in 1906. Back then, local education authorities decided whether or not to provide meals and they were only for children who showed evidence of actual malnutrition. It wasn’t until the second world war that the number of pupils who got school meals began to rise significantly. But even then, the meals weren’t great. Indeed, during this time, the government introduced rationing, which had a significant impact on school meals. 10 , meals were often limited to basic, low-cost ingredients such as vegetables, potatoes and bread.

In the decades after World War II, school meals underwent significant changes. The introduction of new technologies such as electric ovens and refrigerators meant that schools could provide more varied and nutritious meals and menus began to include meat, fish and desserts. The 1970s saw a renewed focus on healthy eating and the introduction of official guidelines for school meals. These guidelines aimed to provide a balanced diet that included plenty of fruit, vegetables and whole grains. But in the 1980s, things went downhill. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher introduced a policy of privatisation, which led to many schools outsourcing their catering efforts to private companies. This move was criticised by many who felt that these companies were more interested in making a profit than providing healthy and nutritious meals to children.

Since then, there have been several initiatives (including Jamie Oliver’s) to improve the quality of school meals in the UK, including the introduction of strict nutritional standards and the promotion of locally sourced and sustainable ingredients. But concerns about the quality of some meals still remain. Indeed, many children continue to bring packed lunches to school instead.

Overall, improving school meals in the UK will require a multi-faceted approach that addresses funding, food quality and sustainability. Most importantly, we need politicians to take a long-term, historically-informed approach to policy-making, so that past mistakes can be learned from and this knowledge is used to inform decisions about school meals going forward. It’s our hope that this research will go some way towards achieving better nutritional standards for future generations.

theconversation.com, 2023

British boat-dwellers left out in the cold

by Tom Wall

People who live on narrowboats and barges¹⁾ – many on low incomes – say they may struggle to stay warm this winter because an increasing number of councils are planning to fine people burning wood on moored vessels¹⁾. Under the Environment Act, which came into force in 2021, council enforcement officers can issue on-the-spot fines of up to £300 to boat-dwellers emitting smoke from wood burners that damages the environment.

The National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA), which represents thousands of travelling people living on Britain’s waterways, said most boaters do not have an alternative way of heating their boats, unlike almost all residential homeowners with wood-burning stoves.

“The vast majority of boats are fitted with solid-fuel stoves,” said Jack Saville from the NBTA. “Many poorer boaters cannot afford smokeless fuels or the latest stoves, which would solve the problem. Some rely on foraged wood, donated wood or waste wood, which gives off more smoke. They 17 . So the threat of fines from an increasing number of councils could stop these often vulnerable people from heating their houseboats this winter.”

There are estimated to be 30,000 to 50,000 people living on boats across the UK. About 15,000 are travelling, moving from mooring to mooring. According to the annual survey of boaters by the Canal and River Trust, almost a quarter are disabled and 70% are pensioners.

While boaters have always burned wood, there has been a boom in homeowners installing log burners in recent years. Government figures show toxic pollution from domestic combustion has almost doubled in the past decade, with the chief medical officer warning that even the most modern stoves emit 450 times more pollution than central heating. Saville, who lives on a boat and moves from place to place across the UK, said most boaters accepted air pollution was harmful: “They know wood smoke is dangerous to health, including their own. But they need to stay warm. They should not be criminalised for what is basically survival.”

Councils are unlikely to have the resources to regularly monitor the output of people’s chimneys so they will rely on public complaints. The NBTA said this could be abused by residents hostile to travelling lifestyles. “There is a risk that the smoke controls could be used to move on boaters,” said Saville. “ 20 there is an issue with resentment towards travelling populations here in the UK.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said councils were required to consult boat owners on smoke controls and consider the impact on vulnerable groups: “Our Environment Act made it easier for local authorities to reduce pollution from domestic burning in smoke control areas.”

theguardian.com, 2023

noot 1 narrowboats and barges, moored vessels = woonboten

Cybersecurity for small businesses

By Samir Jerai

Keri Ackling and her husband run a business called Snow Windows, spraying festive designs on to windows at Christmas. It might not be the obvious target of a cyberattack compared with banks, governments and multinationals, but that’s exactly what happened in 2021. “We received an email to our business account, and things took a turn from there,” Ackling said. The email looked legitimate and the information seemed accurate. It appeared to be from Instagram and said their account was nearing 10,000 followers and was therefore eligible for extra features, such as going live and blue-tick verification. “I clicked on the link and entered my email and password to verify the account,” she explained. “Not long after I did that, I realised all the posts had been wiped from the Instagram account.”

For a business that prided itself on its visual creations and using them to build their customer base through social media, it was a catastrophic blow. An Instagram Story had been posted to the account, demanding a ransom to be paid in bitcoin to get their account back. “There was never any question of paying it. Aside from not wanting to give in to them, we didn’t have any idea how to get hold of bitcoin,” she said.

Ackling and her husband refused to pay and contacted Instagram, which shut down their account without warning. “Huge amounts of our business came through Instagram and our big fear was that we’d never get the account back at all,” she said. The couple mobilised their customers, which included celebrities and media personalities like Chris Moyles to campaign and get their message out. Eventually the account was reinstated, and the log-in was reset. However, problems persisted with Snow Window’s 200,000-follower Facebook account, which was linked to their Instagram.

Snow Windows is still struggling with the legacy of opening that one email in 2021. “Since the Instagram hack, we’ve been unable to post any adverts on to our Facebook business page – an issue Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been unable to fix,” Ackling said. Before the attack, Facebook had been a huge source of business and a valuable marketing tool, but it has effectively been paralysed for the past two years. “It was completely heart-sinking,” Ackling said. “You work so long and so hard to build up social media pages and grow your following and everything had just gone.”

[…27…]

“A fifth of small businesses see cybercrime as the most impactful crime in terms of both cost and disruption to their operations,” said Martin McTague, national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses. “Equipping small firms with the right tools and tailor-made guidance could enable them to be more cyber-resilient and in turn reduce costs in real life.”

newstatesman.com, 2023

Het volgende fragment is het begin van een kort verhaal, geschreven door Leland Cheuk.

“Office of the Mind”

(1) On the first day of work, I sat at my desk in the bedroom and put on my company-issued Office of the Mind (OotM) glasses, earpieces, and haptic gloves. Immediately I was transported into an office again, in a half-cubicle, a new clean desk, a 55-inch HD curved monitor at my workstation, with coworkers chattering all around me in their cubes, like the old days. All of us wore work clothes, and the pop-up tutorial prompted me to customize mine with a few taps of my index finger and thumb tips. In reality, we were likely in the clothes we slept in, inside our various homes, hiding from all the diseases.

“Welcome aboard,” said my cubicle neighbor, a sales engineer named Murray, a middle-aged white gentleman, who added that he was based in Mozambique, originally from the UK. He had moved to Maputo after getting fed up with Brexit and earned citizenship. “Wanna get coffee?” he added. “We can get coffee?!” I squawked.

(2) He laughed and beckoned me to follow. We walked across the virtual cubicle floor, turned the corner at the elevator bank, and waited for the elevator to take us down. In my apartment, I had traversed my bedroom and turned into my closet. I could feel my hanged clothes brushing against my face.

“Where did you work before?” Murray asked.

(3) “I was a freelancer for a long time,” I said, taking a step back. I left it at that. I had been a little shocked I got the job. But every multinational needed readable content these days for the search engine algorithms.

“A lover of freedom, eh?” Murray said.

“Until it became too much.” I kicked myself for saying that. It made me sound like a layabout instead of what the freelancer life was really like: doing fifteen assignments one day for $30 each. Then doing zero assignments the next week and eating packaged ramen for dinner. I just felt lucky to have health insurance for the first time in a decade.

(4) The elevator doors opened. The interior was gold-plated. I felt the familiar unbalanced feeling as we descended. How did my OotM hardware simulate those sensations so accurately?

“It’s the earpieces,” Murray said, as if reading my mind. “They emit electrical pulses that mess with your sense of balance.”

“Wild,” I said with childlike wonder.

electricliterature.com

[a] According to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) more than a third of small businesses suffered a cyber incident last year.

[b] ‘Check Your Cyber Security’ helps average computer users identifying and fixing cybersecurity issues in businesses, charities, schools and other small organisations that are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals.

[c] The organisation has launched a new service which is designed to help small businesses stay secure online and protect their livelihoods.

Short Sleepers

By Rachel Feltman

Sleep is both very mysterious and very important. All animals do it – even ones without brains or central nervous systems (I’m looking at you, jellyfish). And many single-celled organisms have biological functions that follow roughly 24-hour cycles. We know sleep is essential, but we don’t know exactly what it does or how it evolved. One way we can start to learn more about snoozing is to look at how other animals do it, since most of the really robust research we have is on primates and rodents. That’s where a recent study on chinstrap penguins comes in. Researchers found that these flightless birds in Antarctica get about 11 hours of sleep a day, 33 . The real kicker, however, is how they get it: in stints of roughly four seconds.

Scientists hung out with a colony of thousands of breeding chinstrap penguins, keeping close tabs on 14 of them in particular. From the outside, it seemed like the penguins were doing the sort of slow blinking and head jerking you’d expect from sleep-deprived new parents. We already know that these animals spend weeks hardly sleeping to protect their nests from predators and other penguins looking to steal pebbles or eggs, with parents trading off time spent either hunting or guarding. The researchers had to attach electrodes to the birds to even tell they were sleeping at all. But they were: all those little blinks and head nods were brief periods of sleep. They did this about 10,000 times a day, adding up to an apparently sufficient 11 hours.

popsci.com, 2024

The Green Man

Glance upwards as you approach or enter many of Britain’s great cathedrals and churches, and it is more than likely you will catch sight of the Green Man looking down at you. But who is this strange green figure, surrounded by foliage, often with leaves spilling forth from his mouth?

Green Men are usually found on religious buildings but not always: the Green Man is also a popular name for English inns and pubs! However, the Green Man is an example of how images from the Old Religion were brought into Christian churches, and is one of the most ancient, pagan symbols to be found in the Christian church. Pre-Christian pagan traditions and superstitions, 35 , were still influential in the early Middle Ages. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the Green Man seems to appear most often in places where there are stretches of ancient woodland, for example in Devon and Somerset and on the edges of the forest areas of Yorkshire and the Midlands.

As the Green Man is also portrayed with acorns and hawthorn leaves, symbols of fertility in medieval times, this would seem to reinforce the association with spring. However, the common theme which runs through these figures would seem to be that of death and rebirth, and the green that means life. Perhaps then, the Green Man appears on our medieval churches as a symbol of rebirth and resurrection, tying together the old ancient pagan symbols associated with spring with the new faith. Or perhaps the medieval stonemasons were just hedging their bets and incorporating the Green Man into the fabric of the religious buildings as a safety measure, to make doubly sure of the coming of spring and a plentiful harvest!

historic-uk.com

Get ready to dive into Shark Week!

by Chantelle Lee

The annual TV programming on Discovery Channel started Sunday and runs throughout this week until July 13. Here’s everything you need to know about the beloved weeklong event: Shark Week.

1

Each year, the Discovery Channel holds a weeklong event over the summer dedicated to shark-themed programming. The content was initially devoted to conservation efforts and addressing misconceptions about sharks. But some experts have criticized the event, saying that it focuses on the sensationalism of shark attacks rather than on science and conservation. There are 21 programs featured in this year’s Shark Week, including Monster Hammerheads: Species X, which airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. EST and is about a potential new species of hammerhead sharks. You can find the festive week’s full schedule on the Discovery Channel’s website.

2

Caged in Fear aired on the Discovery Channel on July 17, 1988. The show was about testing a new motorized cage meant to resist shark attacks. Nine other shows premiered that year. The ratings during the very week in which the episodes of Caged in Fear aired almost doubled Discovery Channel’s primetime average, according to the network. Because of this great public reception, the Discovery Channel brought back a series of shows about sharks the following year—and it soon became an annual summer event.

3

1994 marked the 20th anniversary of best-selling shark novel Jaws that inspired the cult-classic film. That’s why that year the show got a host: Peter Benchley, the author of the book. Since then, many notable celebrities and conservationists have hosted the event, including Dwayne Johnson, Jason Momoa and Nigel Marven. This year’s anchor is John Cena.

4

Throughout last year’s Shark Week, Discovery ranked as the number one primetime cable network with men and women between the ages of 25 and 54. During the 2023 event, Discovery ranked as the number two primetime network across all of television with men between the ages of 25 and 54. “Shark Week once again proves to be summer’s most anticipated programming event,” Howard Lee, president of Discovery Networks and TLC, said in a press release last year. “We kept our momentum going each night and attracted a big audience.”

time.com, 9 juli 2023

The Names Of Star Wars Characters

Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill has been attempting to solve debate over some of the sci-fi franchise’s pronunciations in a Twitter questionand-answer session with fans and he’s admitted 39 . In a post on Twitter, Mark explained: “FYI: When we would ask creator George Lucas: ‘Is it Chew-bah-ka or Chew-back-a?’ / ‘Is it Lay-a or Lee-a?’ / ‘Is it Hahn or Han (as in hand)?’, he would just shrug and didn’t really care. He told us it would be pronounced in various ways in different parts of the galaxy #TrueStory.”

Other pronunciation mysteries Mark attempted to solve included the AT-AT ̶ the four-legged battle walker used by the Empire ̶ even posting a poll from the official ‘Star Wars’ account which revealed fans were confused. He added: “I think it’s ‘AT- AT’ (using keyboard at symbols), even though I always called them ‘walkers’.”

Dave Filoni ̶ who has worked on numerous ‘Star Wars’ projects as a writer, director and producer for Lucasfilm ̶ previously echoed the sentiment. Speaking at a fan event back in 2020, he explained: “You can say at-at, you can say A-T-A-T, and you can say walker. I’m for all three. That’s canon because in ‘The Clone Wars’ I have imperials say walkers, I have them say at-at, and I have them say A-T-A-T.”

calgaryherald.com, 2022

a How did Shark Week become a thing?

b How popular is Shark Week?

c What is the concept of Shark Week?

d What is the ultimate goal of Shark Week?

e When did Shark Week become an international hit?

f When did Shark Week get a presenter?

g Who came up with the name Shark Week?

h Why are viewers so into Shark Week?