ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2025P3)

Paper

In popular legend, paper was invented in 105 C.E. by Cai Lun, a eunuch in the Chinese court, and over the next 2,000 years it spread ideas and changed the world, thanks largely to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. However, according to the American writer Mark Kurlansky, that is all wrong – and not just because paper predates Cai Lun. The notion that inventions create social change is what he calls a “technological fallacy.” In his view, the world changes first and tools stick if they meet its new needs. The same goes for the digital tools of a potentially paperless age.

What is Kurlansky’s basic point?

Ageing Athletes

A special aspect of sporting maturity is that it happens so early in life. An athlete’s career is played out in fast-forward, when they are still young. Professional and emotional maturity are wildly out of sync. Many sportsmen and sportswomen feel that their sporting careers were practically over before they felt at their most confident outside their special fields. By the time they’ve grown up, their careers are gone. The period of critical decision-making and the exercise of power arrive frighteningly early. Only when they retire do they become young again as they rejoin civilian time.

What is the main focus in this text?

Reading Abbey

There was much excitement recently about the news that – hot on the heels of the finding of Richard III’s body in Leicester a few years ago – an investigation has begun to explore the site of Reading Abbey, which may involve locating the remains of Henry I.

Work to find out more about this important monastic site is very welcome. But it is rather a shame (though unsurprising) that media attention focused chiefly on the possibility of finding the king’s body, rather than on what we might learn from these investigations about the larger story of Reading Abbey. Searching for royal relics seems to be in vogue; there are also explorations going on in Winchester to find the remains of Alfred the Great and to study the bones of Cnut, Harthacnut and other 11th-century kings and queens who have for centuries been unceremoniously jumbled up in mortuary caskets in the cathedral. Fortunately, Henry I does not arouse such strong passions as Richard III. Even if he is found, there is unlikely to be a repeat of the controversies that surrounded Richard’s reburial last year.

Henry is certainly an important part of Reading’s history: he was the founder of the abbey, where he was buried – while it was still incomplete – after his death in 1135. But the monastic history of the town precedes him by more than a century: a religious house for women was supposedly founded in Reading in the tenth century by Queen Ælfthryth, mother of Æthelred the Unready, in memory of her young murdered stepson, Edward the Martyr. Furthermore, the history of Reading Abbey, of course, continued for 400 years after Henry’s time. It was at Reading that the first polyphonic song surviving in English, ‘Summer is icumen in’, was written down in the 13th century – one particular highlight in a long and distinguished institutional history, which concluded violently when the last Abbot of Reading was hanged, drawn and quartered at his own abbey gate in 1539.

The above-ground ruins of Reading Abbey are currently closed to the public, but the abbey precincts are now occupied by a park and a collection of modern office buildings. When I first explored this part of Reading on a sunny autumn weekend, I was struck by how ghostly and lifeless those tall buildings were, in their glittering glass emptiness, towering over the fragments of stone remaining from the abbey. They were more eerie than any medieval ruin could be and just as expressive (a medieval historian might think) of the transitory nature of earthly wealth and power. Reading’s newest skyscraper was built in 2009, at the southern edge of the abbey precincts; will it last centuries, decades, or just a few years?

The historian Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the year of Henry I’s death, provides a memorable take on these questions in the epilogue to his Historia Anglorum. From his perspective in 1135, he looks back to the year 135, and forward to 2135, to situate himself and the powerful people of his time within a considerably longer perspective.

‘This is the year which holds the writer: the thirty-fifth year of the reign of the glorious and invincible Henry, king of the English’, he begins. But then he surveys the great men of 135, the emperors, kings, bishops and archdeacons like Henry himself. What survived of them, he asks, after a thousand years? ‘If any of them strove to win fame,’ he says, ‘and no record of him now survives, any more than of his horse or his ass, why did the wretch torment his spirit in vain?’

Then he looks forward and speaks to those living in the third millennium, in 2135. ‘Consider us, who at this moment seem to be renowned, because we, miserable creatures, think highly of ourselves ... Tell me, what gain has it been to us to have been great or famous? We had no fame at all, except in God.’

Henry’s meditation on mortality strikes a timely note as we inhabitants of the third millennium search for the earthly remains of his ‘glorious and invincible’ king. He might have pointed out that the bodies of the poor and forgotten buried in England’s country churchyards have lain more peacefully, undisturbed for generations, than Henry I in his splendid abbey church. Finding kings under car parks has become something of a popular joke – but a medieval historian might instead have taken it as a poignant reminder of how easily, over the centuries, sacred places become waste.

Eleanor Parker, History Today

What is the main point in the first two paragraphs about recent explorations?

What is stated about the history of Reading?

What is said in relation to Reading Abbey?

What is the author’s reflection at the sight of the Abbey grounds?

It provides …

How can Henry of Huntingdon’s epilogue best be characterized?

Crop Protection

Avian interlopers cost the United States roughly $1.9 billion each year in crop losses and damage control. Now researchers have landed on a potential solution that uses speakers to send out a directional buzzing noise – a sonic shield – to keep feathered pests away from farm fields as well as tall buildings. Since birds vocalize to alert each other to predators and food sources, biologists hypothesized that interrupting the conversation would increase birds’ vigilance, leaving less time for loitering and dining. Indeed, in tests, food patches subjected to eight hours of the so-called sonic net saw a 46 percent drop in bird presence compared with control groups. It proved to be a more lasting and safer deterrent than other tactics, such as high-tech pyrotechnics and poisons.

What is said here about crop protection?

Mozambique

Fertile land, a skyrocketing demand for soybeans and rice, and a government willing to cut big land deals, have put the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique at the center of the land rush sweeping the African continent. In 2013, the nation was the third poorest on the planet, with almost half its children under five stunted by malnutrition. Recent discoveries of world-class coal and gas deposits in the north, as well as other mining and forestry concessions, are slowly changing its fortunes. Massive infrastructure projects are springing up, many financed largely by loans from nations eager to curry favor with political leaders and get in on the action.

What is claimed here about Mozambique?

Silver Coins

A silver twopenny coin, dated 1652, was found by a detectorist in the South Hams of Devon. It was not issued in 1652, however, nor minted in England. It was originally from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English settlement on the east coast of North America. It probably dates from the 1660s or 70s, when the colony understood it had no rights to mint coinage and backdated its issues. It is the sixth such coin to be recorded by the portable Antiquities Scheme, and the first from the south-west of England, all presumed to have been brought home by sailors and merchants.

What can be concluded here in relation to the 17$^{th}$^th century silver coins?