Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas CONSEJERA DE EDUCACIN, JUVENTUD Y DEPORTE Comunidad de Madrid

CERTIFICADO NIVEL INTERMEDIO INGLS

COMPRENSIN AUDITIVA CLAVES DE RESPUESTA

TASK ONE: CHILDREN AND LEARNING

TASK 2: FAME THROUGH ASSASSINATION

TASK 3: CASHLESS SOCIETY

17. getting rid of 20. 15 million people 23. common element

18. trade or prosperity 21. to remove 24. walk out of

19. cultural backgrounds 22. surprising 25. secure computers

TRANSCRIPT:

TASK 1: CHILDREN AND LEARNING 0. DEALING WITH ANGRY KIDS As children most of us were not taught how to deal with anger. Being angry was to be bad. Barbara Wells of Education Plus suggested parents should accept childrens anger and then encourage different behavior. Try to catch your children being good. Tell them what pleases you. You might say: I like the way you came to dinner without being reminded or you did a great job reading to your sister. 1. BE AWARE OF EARLY SIGNS Often times when children have difficulties with reading and writing they are considered to be low achievers or slow learners but the real problem may be a learning disability. Dyslexia is one type of learning disability that affects how a child perceives and processes words, numbers and symbols. Although dyslexia can only be diagnosed by a trained professional, there are some signs that you can look for. In most cases signs of dyslexia show up as soon as children began learning to read. 2. ENCOURAGING WRITING From writing letters to writing speeches, good writing skills will enrich your childs life socially and academically. An early start is the key. Fortunately, most young children love to write. Here is how to encourage them to love writing throughout their lives. Start by reading what your child writes. Take out ideas and sentences you particularly like and ask your child how he or she thought of it. Try to avoid criticism. You can show your kids how useful writing can be by incorporating writing into your routine family life.

EXTRACT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

LETTER A D F E J I B H K

EXTRACT 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

LETTER B B A B C B C

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3. GIVE READING A BOOST A childs ability to read is the single most important factor in determining academic success. Skillful readers usually do well in school. Less skilled readers do not. And parents should not leave the job of teaching reading just after teachers. You can increase your childs reading skills by spending some one-on-one time reading interactively. This means that you go beyond just reading the words. Both of you share thoughts and ideas about what youre reading. 4. FIRST STEPS IN WRITING Most adults think that children cant learn to write until they learn to read. Not true. When your two or three year old draws pictures or scribbles, he or she is beginning to write. Pictures are your childs way of telling a story or describing something that happened. You might see letters in the pictures and although these letters have no literal meaning, they are the next step in the development of writing skills. Later, your child will try to write real words using what is called invented spelling. This means using letters that represent parts of words. 5. THE IMPORTANCE OF GREEN EDUCATION Should environmental education be taught in the classroom? Well, if we dont save the environment, then we were not gonna have any place to live in, its gonna be a disaster, completely. Teaching about the environment is obviously important. Children need to learn and practise certain behaviors that will help to protect our planet. Think Earth is one example of an environmental education programme that was developed to do just that. 6. THE FUTURE CAN BE EVEN WORSE When it comes to violence, Im scared sometimes. I dont wanna be an innocent by-stander if something happened to me or any of my friends. Not only is violence a growing factor in both junior and senior high schools, its also increasing at the elementary level. Whats worse, two thirds of school administrators predict even more problems in the future. 7. BE POSITIVE ABOUT YOURSELF Of all the things you can give your children to help them in life, good self-esteem may be the most important. Self-esteem gives us the confidence to handle challenges and to feel worthy of the things we want such as happiness and success. Without strong self-esteem, life can be full of problems such as depression, low achievement, drug abuse and crime. Self-esteem comes from what children think about themselves, not what other people think. 8. IT CAN BE HARMFUL IF NOT SUPERVISED Most parents agree that too much television can have a bad influence on children but they are not sure what the effects are or how to counter them. Recent studies identified two problems that can result from too much TV. First, children often see complex adult situations on TV. If left alone to interpret mature television stories, children can form unrealistic views of life. 9. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING Most parents know that creativity is a good thing and they like their children to be creative, but many parents think that creativity and intelligence are the same thing. They are not. Creativity is a special type of problem-solving ability thats employed when conventional solutions just wont work. Creativity calls for flexibility and adaptability in the way someone thinks.

www.youtube.com

TASK 2: FAME THROUGH ASSASSINATION It's well-known that in March of 1981, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. What's not well-known is that several years later, the life of the president, and the life of the vice president, were threatened again, in fact, not just once. In the space of 18 months, four situations came to the attention of the Secret Service. This is Robert Fein, who in the mid-80s was working with the Secret Service as a psychologist. In two of these incidents, he says, people with weapons and an intent to kill appeared at public events. In two, they were intercepted before the events. Now, all four of these cases were ultimately prosecuted, though the government didn't exactly advertise it. These were not stories that hit the news, but they were situations that caused great concern for protectors. So

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after these incidents, the Secret Service leadership got together and said - we really would like to know more about the behaviors of these people.

And so Fein and a Secret Service agent named Brian Vossekuil undertook the most extensive study of assassins and would-be assassins ever done. They identified 83 people who had completed assassinations, or made assassination attempts, since 1949 - some cases were known to the public, some not - and collected every document they could find. But also, Fein and Vossekuil went to visit many of these people in jail. In 1999, they published the results in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. And the insights of this study are really interesting to look at. Perhaps the most interesting finding - at least, to me - is that according to Fein and Vossekuil, assassinations of political figures were almost never for political reasons. It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric.

What emerges from the study is that, rather than being politically motivated, most of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives - which, the paper argues, often led to their true motive. They didn't want to be non-entities. They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided rather than being a nobody; they wanted to be a somebody.

They chose political targets, then, because political targets were a sure way to transform the situation; then, they would be famous. Randy Borum is a professor at the University of South Florida, who worked on this study. If the objective is notoriety or fame, that's the most efficient instrumental mechanism by which to achieve that. I don't mean to be flip about that, but a public official is likely to bring them a substantial amount of recognition instantly, without having to achieve something.

One thing Borum and Fein say about choosing a political figure - as opposed to, for example, a show business celebrity - is that the attacker is able to associate himself with a broader political movement or goal, which allows the assassin not to see himself as such a bad person. In this way, Borum says, assassins are basically murderers in search of a cause. People make decisions to act, and then from that construct for themselves - and potentially, for others - a narrative about why that is OK, or how this could be justified. It's sort of a reverse pattern from what we would typically think.

Now, the other assumption that people make about assassins is that they're insane, people completely divorced from reality. But this study, to a degree, rejects that idea as too simplistic. Yes, the authors write, many of the people were experiencing, or had experienced, serious mental health issues. Forty-four per cent had a history of depression; 43, a history of delusional ideas. But as Robert Fein points out, the way these people sought to address what they saw as their main problems - anonymity and failure - wasn't inherently crazy. There's nothing crazy about thinking that if I attacked the president or a major public official, I'd get a lot of attention. I would get a lot of attention. My goal was notoriety. That's why I brought the weapon.

And, Fein says, most of the assassins and would-be assassins weren't totally disorganized by mental illness, either. They were quite organized, because one has to be organized - to at least, some extent - to attack a public official.

www.npr.org, January 2011. TASK 3: CASHLESS SOCIETY

INTERVIEWER: A world without money in our pockets. Its seems unbelievable really. Weve been hearing about the idea of a cashless society for years. But is it really just around the corner? Just what is the point of a cashless society? Human beings have been dealing in cash for many thousands of years. Its how markets, street markets, I mean, work, for example, so why would we want to abandon it? One of the most passionate advocates for a cashless society is Dave Berge, whos a director of Consult Imperium , which advises governments and large companies about electronic money. I asked him to spell out the potential advantages.

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DAVE BERGE: There is an economic efficiency associated with getting rid of cash. The costs of cash are very high, even in the most developed countries, it costs a lot of money to have ATMs, and security guards, and bank vaults and armored cars going around, so just the cost of cash is too high and, of course, that cost is very unevenly distributed because it falls very heavily on the poor. If you are trapped in a cash economy, then having to walk for two hours to pay a utility bill is something that the rich never, never, encounter, they never come across. But there is a second factor as well, which, I think, has a lot to do with fairness, so in great parts of the world cash is nothing to do with commerce, trade, prosperity, its to do with corruption, and crime, and money laundering, and drug dealing. And the economic inefficiencies that that introduces into societies can be crippling.

INTERVIEWER: But how do you go about establishing a cashless society cause we are nowhere near that yet, are we?

DAVE BERGE: I think you see different approaches emerging from different cultural backgrounds and heritages. I think it was theoretical until recently but the advent of the mobile phone has made cashlessness a real possibility in many countries. You look at Kenya and you see the M-Pesa system, which allows you to send money from person to person just using simple messages on your mobile phone. You see 15 million people using that and a third of the countrys GDP flying through the system. In Sweden, you see an alliance of government and labour unions working together to try to remove cash because bank clerks and store clerks, those are the people that get injured in armed robberies. In the Netherlands, you see streets in Amsterdam that wont take cash anymore, you see certain types of shops that wont take cash, like pharmacies and so on.

I saw a very surprised letter in the newspaper the other day from somebody who couldnt use cash at the farmers market in Amsterdam and thought that was really, really surprising. So you see different cultural backgrounds leading to cashlessness in a different way. But you do see one common element, which is that the arrival of the mobile phone has made this possible.

INTERVIEWER: You are not saying as much of that, though, are you, in the developed world its actually happening, as you said in Kenya, in the developing world.

DAVE BERGE: Its different in the developed countries because for a great many people they are very happy with, you know, debit cards and so on, you know, which arent acceptable, but you see the same migration on the way. If you could walk out of the house in the morning without your transit card, without your wallet or any of your credit cards, if you could just walk out with your phone and use that to get on a bus, buy a cup of coffee, pay your friend the 10 pounds you owe them, for most people that would be quite a suitable solution.

INTERVIEWER: What are the technical leaps that weve had apart from simply having mobile phones that are gonna make this more possible?

DAVE BERGE: Crucially, mobile phones have some security with them, the little SIM chip thats inside your mobile phone. Thats the same kind of chip that you find on your bank card or in secure computers. So it adds not just the communications capability but it also adds the security thats critical when you want to bring money into the equation.

THE INTERVEIWER: The argument for a cashless world from Dave Berge of Consult Imperium . BBC Business.

Adapted from BBC Business Daily , April 2012.