Eindexamen Engels vwo 2023, tijdvak 2: vragen en antwoorden

The Favourite

Queen Anne was the first ruler of the newly united Great Britain in the early 1700s; the last Stuart monarch before the Hanoverian dynasty that’s still with us (God save the Queen!). So, there’s your history.

Here, the widowed, childless, semi-invalid Anne is a lonely, eccentric figure, stuck in the gilded cage of her palace, who leaves the managing of national affairs to her childhood friend, the formidable Sarah Churchill.

Sarah is the wife of John Churchill, head of the armed forces (and of another dynasty that’s still with us). The Duke of Marlborough, as John is also known, is off fighting the French, comme de tradition, and one of Sarah’s jobs is to bully parliament into keeping his war funded.

Sarah, then, is pretty much in charge until the arrival of an impoverished cousin, Abigail, who seeks work as a servant. Abigail then sets about working her way up the hierarchy, all the way to the Queen’s bedchamber…

This witty, bawdy and occasionally absurdist story of court politics is great fun (despite some gratingly annoying music) and probably accurate (at least) in showing how fragile both power and social status were in that era.

mercifullyshortreview.wordpress.com, 2019

Decision time

1 Lawyers quip that justice is what the judge ate for breakfast. New research suggests that justice might actually depend on when the judge ate breakfast.

2 Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel and Columbia University examined more than 1,000 decisions by eight Israeli judges who ruled on convicts’ parole requests. Judges granted 65 percent of requests they heard at the beginning of the day’s session and almost none at the end. Right after a snack break, approvals jumped back to

65 percent again.

3 Jonathan Levav, associate professor of business at Columbia, said that the judges could just be grumpy from hunger. But they probably also suffer from mental fatigue. Previous studies have shown that repeated decisions make people tired, and they start looking for simple answers. For instance, after making a slew of choices, car buyers will start accepting the standard options rather than continuing to customize.

4 , judges may find it easier to deny requests and let things stand as they are.

4 Levav says he suspects a similar effect occurs in hospitals, university admissions offices or anywhere people make repeated decisions. So if you’re thinking about asking the boss for something special, you might want to do it right after a nice lunch. ─Kurt Kleiner

Scientific American, 2011

Books still hold the upper hand My two cents

Eliane Glaser

1 When the UK’s National Literacy Trust announces that tablet computers help disadvantaged children to read, liberal-minded book lovers like me sit up and listen.

2 The NLT published research suggesting that “touchscreen technology can be more effective in engaging children aged three to five with reading than books”, and that these effects are amplified in low- income households.

3 The research is a collaboration with Pearson, the multinational currently extending its corporate tentacles into every aspect of education. The Trust is now part-funded by Pearson, which aims to make digital products and services 70% of its sales by 2015.

4 Thus the cosy connotations of ‘literacy’ and ‘trust’ are here being used to introduce the very technologies that are killing reading and writing. Digital and online technology is fragmenting our attention spans and demolishing the publishing industry.

5 For the most part, the media has run with the headline findings about literacy and inequality, cheerleading big business’s exploitation of poverty as a fig leaf for market expansion. But these headlines are derived from marginal and contradictory data. The majority of the report demonstrates the enduring primacy of books. Children are much more likely to enjoy stories in books than stories on a screen. Children are 34 times more likely to read storybooks daily than stories on tablets daily. Children are four times more likely to read stories in a book for more than 30 minutes. Children are more likely to read stories on tablets on their own, losing out on the huge benefits of reading with a parent.

6 New technology makes amnesiacs of us all, so it can create the conditions for its own apparent necessity. Let’s not forget that the moguls of Silicon Valley send their children to Steiner-Waldorf schools, where they play with junk modelling in the open air and are not allowed to use computers, even at home. The men who design our gadgets know that children need to learn about the world from first principles. They need to explore with their hands and do sums in their heads.

The Guardian Weekly, 2015

Mad Hatter’s Tea Party acro-batty fun

Greg Bruce

1 The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party is not quite pitch perfect in its attempt to hit all the possible multiple demographics with its co-mingling of stunts, jokes, acrobatics and party tricks, but it is close enough that you can confidently call it psychedelically infused fun for the whole family.

2 Some of the jokes, especially the innuendos, are shocking enough to elicit a sideways glance to see if you really heard what you definitely heard

• and to make sure your children have no idea what’s going on.

3 The show’s influences are, broadly, circus, musical, stand-up comedy and, obviously, also the wild mind-wanderings that comprise the source material, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

4 The problem with circus-inspired stage shows, at least from a cynical adult’s point of view, is that Cirque du Soleil has so flooded the market with audacious and frequently dangerous stunt-driven choreography that 9 . For kids though, and those parents willing to set aside their cynicism and watch The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party through their children’s eyes, the choreography is difficult enough and dangerous enough to elicit joy.

5 There is a loose storyline but what ties the show together is really the Master of Ceremonies/narrator/provocateur that is the Mad Hatter (Eloise Green) herself. Long before the show has even begun, she is already circulating among the on-stage portion of the audience, telling jokes and setting the tone.

6 The fact there is an on-stage portion of the audience at all is clear evidence of the amount of thought that has gone into creating the show. Most of the performance takes place on a raised catwalk in the centre of the stage, with the rest of the space entirely taken up by the audience. This level of thought has gone into the show from many angles: the spread and pacing of the acrobatics, the song and dance numbers, jokes, on-stage banter and audience interaction.

7 What ties it together though, and makes it a coherent whole, is the slightly unhinged Mad Hatter, a performer worthy of having a show named after her.

adapted from The New Zealand Herald, 2018

Letters to the Editor: Beachfront housing for $215 per month? Only if you’re a state worker

1 Kudos to The Times for its exposé on yet another government scandal: the ability of some public employees to pay very low rent to live in state- owned homes in highly sought-after recreational areas. 11-1 Thanks for keeping the fire underneath the heels of our state agencies. I suspect that there will be a treasure trove of yet more unethical behavior if you dig deep enough. John T. Chiu, Newport Beach

2 I read your article on state parks employees’ housing perk. It seems we have a case of jealousy here. Someone is getting something I’m not. Oh no. With the low pay and long hours these public servants put in day after day, having discounted housing on site so they can watch over our spectacular scenic resources where they live should be considered part of their pay. It would have been nice to have someone at the Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave Desert a few years ago. After the rangers who patrolled the area retired in 2010 and were not replaced, vandals carted off everything from electrical wiring to diesel generators. When an emergency is in progress every second counts, and having someone on site to watch over everything is a necessity nowadays. With all that is happening in the world right now, is someone getting an employee perk really this important? 11-2 Dannie Fox, Arizona City, Ariz.

adapted from latimes.com, 2020

A new book spells out the magic of language

David Adger explains an unsung human superpower

1 In Avengers: endgame, a superhero blockbuster, the baddy’s Infinity Gauntlet gives him the power to snuff out the universe with the snap of a finger. This may sound impressive, but ̶ although few realise it ̶ ordinary people possess an infinite power, too: language.

2 Steven Pinker, a professor of linguistics, reckons a conservative estimate of the number of grammatical, 20-word sentences a human might produce is at least a hundred million trillion ̶ far more than the number of grains of sand on Earth. Most can easily be made longer. In theory, the only thing preventing this power from being literally infinite is the human lifespan: some possible sentences would be too long to say even in threescore years and ten.

3 This awesome talent is the subject of a new book, Language Unlimited by David Adger of Queen Mary University, the president of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. Mr Adger does not just celebrate language’s infinity. He maintains that it is the distinct result of a unique capacity.

4 The book’s first, and strongest, claim is that human language is different from animal communication not just in scope, but in kind. Most important, it is hierarchical and nested in structure. Mr Adger embraces the theory that only humans possess a mental function in which two components may be joined to a larger one that can then be operated on by the mind’s grammar-processor. A highly trained bonobo called Kanzi can obey commands such as ‘Give water [to] Rose’. But Kanzi does no better than random chance when told to ‘Give water and lighter to Rose’. 13 , a two-year-old child tested alongside Kanzi quickly intuits that two nouns can make up a noun phrase, tucked as a direct object into a verb phrase, which in turn is part of a sentence. This ‘recursive’ structure is key to syntax.

5 The second claim is that language is innate, not merely an extension of general human intelligence. Fascinating evidence comes from children who are deprived of it. Deaf pupils at a school in Nicaragua, having never shared a language with anyone before, created a grammatically ornate sign language on their own. A few deaf children in a Mexican family devised a rich sign system with complex grammatical features found in spoken tongues: in their ‘homesign’, nouns are preceded by a ‘classifier’, a sign indicating their type, just as they sometimes are in Chinese. It seems the human mind simply cannot help but deal in grammar.

6 A more controversial claim is that all human languages share a ‘universal grammar’. This proposition has taken some hard knocks, because the universals that hold up best are negative. There are many sensible things languages could do, but don’t. Notably, their grammars do not make use of ‘continuous’ features, such as the length of vowels. For instance, a past-tense verb could be pronounced for a longer time to indicate how long ago the action occurred ̶ perfectly logical, but no language does this. Whether this is proof of universality is a matter of opinion.

7 Still, Mr Adger’s tour of linguistics is entertaining and accessible. His book is a handy introduction to a vexed debate on the infinite power of the finite mortal mind.

adapted from The Economist, 2019

Fake News? How about no news?

BOOK REVIEW

Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy By Margaret Sullivan. 105 pages. Columbia Global Reports. $15.99

BY JENNIFER SZALAI

1 What do you call it when a hedge fund buys a local U.S. newspaper and squeezes it for revenue, laying off editors and reporters and selling off the paper’s downtown headquarters for conversion into luxury condos or a boutique hotel?

2 The devastation has become common enough that some observers have resorted to shorthand for what collectively amounts to an extinction-level event. One former editor calls it a “harvesting strategy”; Margaret Sullivan, in her new book, “Ghosting the News,” calls it “strip-mining.” Like the climate emergency that Sullivan mentions by way of comparison, the decimation of local news yields two phenomena that happen to feed off each other: The far-reaching effects are cataclysmic, and it’s hard to convince a significant number of people that they ought to care.

3 “Disinformation” and “fake news” bring to mind scheming operatives, Russian troll farms and noisy propaganda; stories about them are titillating enough to garner plenty of attention. But what Sullivan writes about is a “real-news problem” ─ the shuttering of more than 2,000 American newspapers since 2004, and the creation of “news deserts,” or entire counties with no local news outlets at all.

4 She begins her book with the example of a 2019 story from The Buffalo News in New York State about a suburban police chief who received an unexplained $100,000 payout when he abruptly retired. The article didn’t win any awards or even appear on the front page, Sullivan writes. “It merely was the kind of day-in- and-day-out local reporting that makes secretive town officials unhappy.”

5 “Ghosting the News” is a brisk and pointed tribute to painstaking, ordinary and valuable work. Sullivan has spent most of the past decade writing for a national audience, but for 32 years before that she worked at The Buffalo News, starting as a summer intern and eventually becoming the newspaper’s editor. She recalls the flush days when that paper boasted a newsroom fully staffed by

journalists who could combine their calling with a career. Then came the internet, which siphoned off attention and revenue; after that, the deluge of the 2008 financial crisis, which swept away the vestiges of print advertising. Sullivan cut the payroll of the paper by offering buyouts. She got rid of the art critic and the Sunday magazine ─ “a particularly wrenching decision because my then-husband was the magazine’s editor.”

6 The Buffalo News was owned by Warren Buffett until the beginning of this year, when Buffett declared it was time for him to leave the newspaper industry and sold his portfolio of 31 dailies and 49 weeklies. Buffett said that he believed in the importance of journalism but that he didn’t consider himself a philanthropist. He got into the business because it made money, with fat profit margins in the good years reaching 30 percent. When he bought The Buffalo News in 1977, he decided that the city could sustain only one daily, and he knocked out the competition until his was the last paper standing. A monopoly newspaper was like an unregulated toll bridge: with a loyal and captive market, he could raise rates whenever he wanted.

7 Advertisers may have been peddling baubles or junk food, but their cash funded serious journalism ─ the kind that could afford to send a reporter to, say, every municipal board meeting. “People knew that,” the former editor of the once mighty Youngstown Vindicator in Ohio told Sullivan, “and they behaved.” This watchdog function had tangible benefits for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. “When local reporting waned,” Sullivan writes, “municipal borrowing costs went up.” Local news outlets provide the due diligence that bondholders often count on. Without the specter of a public shaming, corruption is freer to flourish.

8 Sullivan surveys the alternative models that have sprung up in response to journalism’s ecosystem collapse. There’s the nonprofit reporting outfit ProPublica, and a “news brigade” of volunteer journalists in Michigan. Sullivan’s own employer was acquired by Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million. “Jeff Bezos has not attempted to influence coverage at The Washington Post,” she writes, though billionaire owners aren’t always so 24 . The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the well-respected Review-Journal in Las Vegas, which was known for its investigative pieces on the casino industry, and leaned on its staff to produce puff pieces about his properties instead. Adelson turned the watchdog into a lap dog.

9 Recently, local journalists recorded the influx of unidentified federal troops into Portland, Oregon, where they were seizing and detaining people without telling them why or what was happening to them; the example was too late to be included in Sullivan’s book, and it only goes to show how critical and relentless the need is for reporters on the ground.

10 “Ghosting the News” concludes with a soaring quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci about “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,” but the local reporter in Sullivan follows it up with a more immediate analogy: Even if no one seems to be coming to the rescue while your house is on fire, you still have to “get out your garden hose and bucket, and keep acting as if the fire trucks are on the way.”

adapted from New York Times, 2020

De volgende tekst is het begin van het verhaal Security, geschreven door Yvette Edwards.

1 Merle noticed the security guard the moment she stepped through the entrance of Penny World: a tall, heavy-set white man, mid-forties, who had positioned himself on top of a barstool at the front of the store to have an unobstructed view of customers entering; and she knew he’d clocked her, because he stood up straightaway, trying to make the action seem natural by generally surveying the store, as if that had been his intention all along, and it surprised her, the anger she felt ̶ hot and rapid, erupting inside her chest like a volcano come to life ̶ surprised her at a time when she was upset with so many other things, proper problems with longevity attached, that this incident, when she’d just popped out to pick up some Sure deodorant and a roll of clingfilm, was the blow that finally swept her over the edge.

2 Her flight was tomorrow morning at 11 and arrangements had been made to pick her up at 5 a.m. so she didn’t miss it. She’d bought the suitcase last week, had to, because the only one she’d ever owned was the one she’d brought with her when she made the six-week boat journey from Jamaica to England in June 1964, which had for years been reclining on top of her wardrobe, the metal handle broken, clasps defunct, reduced in status to a storage container, nothing more. She’d not been back to Jamaica since arriving here, had never gone on holiday abroad, never had need of a passport, and here she was, at the age of seventy-eight, making the journey back with a suitcase from Cheap Cheaper Cheapest that had a zip that kept catching when she tried to close it, and brittle wheels that clattered noisily behind her, after she’d paid for it and hauled the brand-new empty thing home.

3 She’d packed ̶ probably overpacked ̶ it, and it sat open on her bed, just waiting for the Sure deodorant to be put inside. Once she’d done that and wrestled again with the dodgy zip, the clingfilm would be wrapped around the suitcase to give her the greatest chance of making it to Kingston, on this, her first journey back, with her dignity and its contents intact. The security guard wore a dark clean- pressed uniform and a flat black army cap pulled so low on his head, it almost touched the thin-rimmed frame of his large mirrored glasses, and he had the restless air of the American coppers Merle had seen in Hollywood action movies, lounging on the bonnet of a police car, impatient to use their gun. Ordinarily, she would’ve picked up a basket to put her goods in as she walked around, held the basket high and visible, would’ve kept it on the opposite side of her body to her handbag, in the hope of conveying the fact that she was an honest person who’d

never shoplifted a thing in her life; but today her anger prevented her doing that.

A voice in her head whispered a sentence she was too polite to dream of saying aloud, but it so perfectly synchronized with her mood, she nearly smiled: Let him kiss out me backside.

4 She knew the deodorants were shelved on Aisle 4, and the clingfilm on Aisle 5. The most direct route was to cut across the front corridor between the tills and the aisles, but she decided against that. Instead, she began walking the length of Aisle 1, stopping in front of shelves filled with nuts and dried fruit, stealing furtive glances upwards in the direction of the store camera fixed to the ceiling, in a manner she hoped looked very suspicious. She picked up some pistachios, examined the package, turning it over as though reading the information on the back, even though what was written there was in another language. She didn’t check in the direction she had just come, didn’t need to, because she knew the security guard had followed her. She felt him the same way she had felt him watching and following her around on previous visits. She peered up again at the camera, then away, put the packet back on the shelf, and carried on walking.

5 Seventy-eight years of age, and with the neat and tidy way she always dressed and carried herself, were she a stranger trying to work out what kind of person she might be, the word that would have come to mind is church. Despite this, in the fifty-four years she’d been living in England and spending her money in shops with security guards, she’d regularly been followed around like a thief.

electricliterature.com, 2019

Why Orwell’s 1984 could be about now

adapted from an article by Jean Seaton

1 Reading 1984, George Orwell’s claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism, is still a shock. First comes the start of recognition: we recognise what he describes. Doublethink (holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time), Newspeak, the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love that deals in pain, despair and annihilates any dissident, the Ministry of Peace that wages war: Orwell opened our eyes to how regimes worked.

2 But now we can read 1984 differently: with anxious apprehension, applying it to measure where we, our nations and the world have got to on the road map to a hell Orwell described. Prophetic? Possibly. But stirring, moving, creative, undeniable and helpful? Yes. A book published on 8 June 1949, written out of the battered landscape of total war, in a nation hungry, tired and grey, feels more relevant than ever before, because Orwell’s 1984 also arms us.

3 The book defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny. Winston Smith, the protagonist, works as a censor in the Ministry of Truth in a constant updating of history to suit present circumstances and shifting alliances. He and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing presence of Big Brother. In 1984 television screens watch you, and everyone spies on everyone else. Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online, and feeds an omniscient presence in our lives that can predict our every preference. Modelled on consumer decisions, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy.

4 Orwell understood that oppressive regimes always need enemies. In 1984 he showed how these can be created arbitrarily by whipping up popular feeling through propaganda. Now political, religious and commercial organisations all trade in whipping up feelings. Orwell uncannily identified 36 that such movements can elicit: and of course Winston observes it in himself. So, by implication, might we in ourselves.

5 Then there is his iconic dictator Big Brother: absurd and horrifying in equal measure. Orwell’s writing 37 the giant ‘-isms’ that disfigured the 20th Century. Orwell fought against Fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War but realised the hollow promise of Communism, when the anti-Stalinist group he was fighting for was hunted down by the pro-Stalin faction. He witnessed first- hand the self-deception of true believers. Today there is another set of ‘-isms’, such as nationalism and populism that operate through the mobilisation of that most dangerous of feelings, resentment. And everywhere you look in the contemporary world, ‘strong’ men are in positions of power. They share the need to crush opposition, a fanatical terror of dissent and self-promotion. Big Brothers are no longer a joke but strut the world.

6 But the greatest horror in Orwell’s dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language. The regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. Its real enemy is reality. Tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with phantoms and lies. The terror in 1984 is the annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognise the real world.

7 You cannot separate Orwell’s work from the man. He is increasingly viewed as a kind of a saint, but how he would laugh at the statues of him that are sprouting up. His views towards feminists (though not women), vegetarians and other groups would hardly pass the test now. But he was a man who lived by his beliefs. He made himself genuinely poor; he fought for what he thought was right; he was unfailingly generous and kind to other writers, and yet he taught himself to try and see the world as it was, not how he would like it to be. He was never compliant, and he forensically unearthed for our gaze the worst of himself.

8 It is not only that we live in a world transformed by Orwell’s insights in that it shapes how we see oppression. But 1984 is also a handbook for difficult times. Knowledge is a kind of strength and we are all being tested.

bbc.com, 2018

Dyer situation

I share Danny Dyer’s concerns about the number of public school- educated cabinet members (‘Danny Dyer, actor in Eastenders, calls for working class representation in politics,’ 28 October). And it ’s not just the government that is affected: 7 per cent of pupils are educated in private

5 schools but 65 per cent of senior judges are privately educated; 52 per cent of diplomats; 44 per cent of newspaper columnists; 32 per cent of Oxbridge offers. Can it be good for our society that so many of its citizens cannot go to the best universities and will not get certain jobs because their parents cannot

10 afford private school fees? Is it now time to end what Theresa May called in 2017 “the burning injustice” of this disparity? At the very least, is it time to challenge what Michael Gove called in the same year “the egregious state support to the already wealthy, so that they might buy advantage for their own children”?

William Barnes

independent.co.uk, 2020

A New Approach

Re “Bitter irony of revolutions” (Victor Davis Hanson, June 11): The U.S.A. had a black president and Americans were told hope and change would follow. But it didn’t. Political correctness shapes behaviour. Now, police have been killed on the job both in Canada and U.S.A. Some cops, unfortunately, are criminally violent with perpetrators. Is the solution to abolish the police? Clearly both south and north of the border a new approach is indicated. Hanson outlines the irony of revolution that 42 . We all need police protection, but we do not ask for cruelty and killing over marginal and non-violent infractions. Surely our species has evolved enough to make the needed change without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Larry Sylvester Acton, Ontario

Torontosun.com, 2020

The Arcology Concept

What is an Arcology?

Arcology is the fusion of architecture with ecology, a comprehensive urban perspective. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the diversified activities that sustain human culture and environmental balance. Arcology suggests complete reformulation of how we exist within our environments

• a new urban paradigm geared towards cultural evolution, frugal resiliency, and balance with nature.

Some Design Principles:

1 As cities grow, farmland is pushed far away from the urban center. As a result, citizens are detached from where and how their meals are sourced. In the urban form of Arcology, the citizens are connected with the production of food in a way that confirms the necessity of robust agriculture systems. Efficient use of water and energy through greenhouses and other innovative systems also contributes to overall efficiency of the city.

2 By utilizing available technologies, such as passive climate controlling architecture, innovative water & sewage treatment systems, and use of appropriately sourced building materials, Arcology strives for reduction of material and energy use and an increased quality of life.

3 In cities around the world, we empirically observe the benefits of combining functions and activities within urban space. Properties such as enhanced city safety, a vibrant sense of community, and utility efficiency all add up to a truly beneficial urban form. The crucial spaces within the city become shared, public spaces

• accessible by all, respected in common, thriving with socialization, confrontation and growth. The city can become much more than the sum of its parts.

4 Urban growth limits are a common element of modern American city- planning, though they are often the result of efforts to protect remaining farmland and other rural or open spaces, rather than efforts to enhance the cities themselves. In Arcology, the ecological envelope idea is understood as a means of protecting the environment, of course, but it is also understood as a way to provide lively and robust urban activities. Rather than sprawling outward toward a prescribed limit (which may still exceed the resource capacity of the actual environment), Arcology seeks to grow upward and inward.

adapted from arcosanti.org, 2020

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