Język angielski, matura 2026 maj - dwujęzyczny - pytania i odpowiedzi

THE TRUE STORY OF THE AERONAUTS

Considering the extent to which women were tethered to their husbands and homes in centuries past, it is exhilarating to watch Amelia Wren (portrayed by Felicity Jones) soar above it all in The Aeronauts, a film released in 2019 and directed by Tom Harper. Felicity Jones is accompanied in the film by Eddie Redmayne playing the real-life British meteorologist James Glaisher, who thinks he can advance his research into weather by going up in a hot-air balloon.

You might think that Amelia piloting hot-air balloons through English skies in the 1860s must have been a wonderful inspiration for women! Except for the fact that Amelia Wren is a figment of the imagination of the screenwriter, Jack Thorne. In fact, Amelia Wren is a stand-in for Henry Coxwell, Glaisher’s co-aeronaut, who rose above London in 1862 and flew up to 37,000 feet. The gender swap has led to accusations of Hollywood being overly politically correct.

Harper’s team did invent Amelia Wren completely but her character is inspired by some real women who flew balloons decades before Glaisher and Coxwell’s flight, and in particular by Sophie Blanchard, who was a French aeronaut.

Hot-air balloons became quite the rage in the 1780s. According to Atlas Obcura, the first woman to make a flight in an untethered balloon was an opera singer, Elisabeth Thible. She flew with a Monsieur Fleurant on board a hot-air balloon christened La Gustave. She was the replacement for a count who’d backed out of the flight at the last minute in Lyon in 1784. Later, in 1798, also in France, Jeanne Garnerin made the first solo ascent and became an example which other women followed. Her compatriot, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, was one of the first men to cross the English Channel in a balloon. In order to entertain the crowds, he liked to make his flights more thrilling, for example by launching fireworks from his balloons. In 1804, mainly for publicity, he invited his wife Sophie onto his balloon and though she was a very cautious person on the ground, she immediately fell in love with this potentially hazardous activity. When Jean-Pierre suffered a heart attack and died, she did not give up ballooning. Sophie Blanchard pushed many boundaries during her career. Once, she flew to such altitudes that she passed out. On another occasion, she almost froze.

The thrill of The Aeronauts undoubtedly lies in the death-defying feats it depicts. The film is also visually stunning thanks to its computer-generated effects and the artistry of the cinematographer, George Steel, and the production designers. In a startling sequence in which Amelia climbs to the top of her balloon to unscrew a frozen valve and release air so that the balloon could descend, her bleeding, frostbitten hands speak of the enormity of the task itself. Yet, The Aeronauts stumbles time and again because of its attempt to add the juice of fiction to the original story. Regrettably, the truth, in Hollywood terms, is never enough.

B. The latter experiment shows that the late Neolithic people who built Stonehenge weren’t used to the acoustics of large walls and enclosed spaces. Thus, they would have likely found the effect mesmerizing. Cox likens Stonehenge’s acoustic properties to the difference between standing in an empty cinema as opposed to a cathedral. 

C. Although Stonehenge is the world’s most architecturally sophisticated ancient stone circle, archaeologists still don’t know who built it and what it was used for, so the massive monument remains a mystery. However, thanks to a study carried out in 2020 by Trevor Cox from the University of Salford, one more fascinating detail about this site was discovered: it once acted as a giant echo chamber, amplifying sounds made inside the circle to those standing within it. 

D. The results of this experiment surprised Cox: although Stonehenge has no roof, sound bounces between the gaps in the stones and lingers within the space. And the stones play an important role. It turned out that in an open, natural environment, like the grassy hill Stonehenge is built on, a listener facing away from a speaker would have only understood about one-third of the words. However, the reflections from the stones at Stonehenge would have amplified the voice by four decibels, increasing comprehensibility to 100%. 

E. Obviously, in order to be reliable, this miniature copy had to be as close to the original structure as possible. That’s why, prior to building his model, Trevor Cox needed to know what Stonehenge looked like 4,000 years ago. And here English Heritage came to his rescue by providing him with a computer visualization of Stonehenge.

A DUTCH TEENAGER WHO HAD A DREAM

A. The eradication of oceanic garbage patches has been Boyan Slat’s single-minded goal ever since he was 16 years old, when his diving trip to Greece yielded more plastic bag sightings than fish. Obsessed with the idea of creating a floating barrier that could collect plastic using the power of ocean currents alone, he founded the company The Ocean Cleanup. Now, Slat will watch as System 001 – a floating barrier nearly 2,000 feet long – snakes its way out into the Pacific. Its destination is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of plastic waste twice the size of Texas held in position by ocean currents between California and Hawaii. 

B. The project has come a long way since an early prototype of System 001 was featured in TIME’s list of the best inventions of 2015. What was originally envisaged as a large rigid barrier arranged around a central tank for collecting plastic is today an unmanned, modular system that moves with the currents, naturally gravitating to areas of higher concentration. It looks like a pipeline sitting on the surface of the sea, but beneath the waves lies a 10-foot deep “skirt”, which traps the plastic accumulated by the current. Unlike earlier projects of its kind, the system does not use nets, and thus prevents sea life from becoming entangled. The hope is that plastic will accumulate as if on a seashore, ready to be collected by boats and taken for recycling.

C. It’s an ambitious plan, and one that has received millions of dollars of funding thanks to fast-shifting public opinion on plastic. In December 2017, a UN resolution to eliminate ocean plastic pollution was signed by nearly 200 countries. As a consequence, big corporations are supposed to eliminate single-use plastics from their goods and services as soon as possible. But reducing our addiction to plastic is just one half of the equation. “These garbage patches won’t go away by themselves. Even if we were to close the tap today, the plastic would still be there in a hundred years,” Slat says. 

D. Slat sees his mission as a race against time. Plastic gradually breaks down into smaller pieces called microplastics which can eventually enter the food chain and affect the health of both marine and land creatures. Currently, 8% of the plastic mass in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is microplastics, according to research carried out by his company and published in the journal Scientific Reports. “But of course what’s going to happen over the next few decades is that all the other 92% of the plastic will be turned into microplastics as well,” Slat says. 

E. A thorny question that remains is what will happen to the plastic that is brought back to shore. Slat says he wants to turn it into branded merchandise, but acknowledges that it all depends on the quality of the plastic, which remains unknown. Nowadays, most of the plastic in the oceans is single-use. “By not making it into anything single-use, you can already reduce the chances of it ending up back in the oceans by 99%,” he says. But he fears that some of the waste returned to land might ultimately be used by third-party companies to produce more single-use plastics destined to return to the oceans.