ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2011P5)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fi ts the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

Population Peaks

World population projections need to be treated with caution. Malthus could be forgiven for his pessimism, working as he was 200 years ago, but as late as 1968 Professor Paul Ehrlich was blowing the same warning trumpet that we were in danger of breeding ourselves into oblivion. How ever, there is nothing more 1._____ than human behaviour. Even before the birth of the world’s six billionth inhabitant in 1999, demographers had marked the deceleration of population growth. Now a team in Australia is talking about the end of world population growth.

Looking back is easier than looking forward. The world’s population has doubled since 1960 and quadrupled in the 20th century. 2._____ the rate of growth was already slow ing from 2.4% per year down to 1.8% in the 1990s. The change in distribution has been equally dramatic: Africa, until the advent of Aids, has tripled its population since 1960 and Asia has seen a doubling.

Sensibly, the 1994 United Nations conference on population and development focused on human needs rather than human 3._____. Delegates estimated that by 2000, some $17 bn would be needed if education access was to be widened and women’s reproductive health rights extended. This 4._____ is still far short of being met. Average birth rates for women in developing countries have fallen from six per woman to three in the past three decades. Like the developed world, the developing world is getting older with the 10% over 60 expected to rise to 20% by 2050. But there are even more urgent problems. Three out of five people in the third world 5._____ basic sanitation, one third have no access to clean water, one quarter no adequate housing, and one fifth no access to modern health facilities. Meeting these challenges is overdue.

The Guardian Weekly

Making History

Sir Bernard Crick’s essay The Making of the United Kingdom comprises the history element of the Home Office’s pamphlet for new citizens. It begins, “To understand a country well and the character of its inhabitants, some history is needed.” Though a seemingly anodyne document, it represents a significant moment in our official approach to history.

For the first time, certain parts of our story are being highlighted as representative of national identity. Despite claims that the document is there to help people understand conversational references to “Dunkirk spirit”, history in the hands of the Home Office has become a powerful tool. The past is being mobilised to assist the government’s campaign for greater integration. The multiculturalism of the 1980s and 90s, with its emphasis on the validity of indigenous and adopted cultures, is being abandoned in favour of a codification of Britishness.

Charged with such an onerous responsibility, how does Crick do? Well, quite rightly, he prefaces his narrative with a warning about the subjective nature of his approach. “Any account of British history is ... an interpretation. No one person would agree with another what to put in, what to leave out, and how to say it.” With that out of the way, Crick then launches into a Whiggish chronicle of the “making” of modern Britain.

And, as predicted, there is something here to infuriate and please all audiences. At times, the narrative appears superfi cial; at other times overcomplicated. Radicals will quibble with Crick’s characterization of Oliver Cromwell as a “God-fearing dictator” and certainly dispute his rosy view of empire. Traditionalists might raise an eyebrow at the single paragraph devoted to the Industrial Revolution. They might also find undercurrents of bias in his treatment of the Thatcher and Blair administrations.

To my mind, there is not enough intellectual history or a proper account of the role of religion. There are plenty of Kings and Queens, but no Thomas Hobbes or Charles Darwin. Cultural historians will be disappointed by notable absences in their fi eld. But given every critic will have an axe to grind, Crick has done a magnifi cent job of presenting Britain’s complex, multifarious past in a comprehensible and intelligent way. He appropriately positions the UK within both a European and global perspective. Above all, this history reads well. Thankfully, it does not seem to have been hacked together by committee. Instead, it enjoys an authorial tone which carries the reader along.

Nonetheless, behind The Making of the United Kingdom lurks an official agenda. Underpinning the narrative is an argument about Britain being a nation of migrants who, over the past centuries, have successfully come together by carefully combining their indigenous traditions with a new British identity. “We have been, after all, a multinational and multicultural society for a long time now without losing either our over arching British identity or our Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English cultural and national identities.”

Thus, new citizens are reassured that they comprise but the latest chapter of our national story. Immigration and integration are as redolent of British history as John Bull, the Battle of Trafalgar and the Blitz spirit. But, Crick rightly reminds them, “It all works reasonably well so long as no identities are asserted as exclusive of others.”

One of the best-selling history books of the last few years was George Courtauld’s traditionalist polemic, The Pocket Book of Patriotism. Upset by the state of history teaching in schools, Courtauld successfully packaged together an arbitrary collection of dates and details to remind his readership of the building blocks of the British past. Crick’s pamphlet is an altogether more sophisticated answer to such worries in an age of ever greater migrant flows. And, truth be told, if new citizens were to absorb his rich and subtle account of British history, they would be in a stronger position than many “native” undergraduates.

Tristram Hunt, BBC History