ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2026P5)

Nellie Bly

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 fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

With his 1873 classic Around the World in Eighty Days, master raconteur Jules Verne skilfully captured the excitement of an era in which people could feel the planet shrinking beneath their feet. No one tested the plausibility of the story for 17 years until, in 1889, two people took up the challenge at once.   31   the age, both were women.

Nellie Bly was born Elisabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 in a small Pennsylvanian town. In 1885, Cochran read an article in The Pittsburgh Dispatch that would change her life. The viciously misogynistic piece, ‘What Girls Are Good For’, criticised women for attempting to gain an education, forge a career or stray too far from home. Under the pseudonym ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’, Cochran sent a response that so impressed the editor, George Madden, with its combination of incandescent rage and dignified prose that he published both the letter and an invite for the writer to come in to the office. Madden suggested she write a full riposte to the   32   article, and the resulting feature, ‘The Girl Puzzle’, led to a full-time job.

Bly scored her first major scoop after accepting an undercover assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and deliberately getting committed to New York’s infamous Blackwell’s Island women’s asylum. She spent ten days collecting content about the abuse and inhuman treatment that was meted out before being   33   by the World. Her subsequent article, ‘Ten Days in a Madhouse’, directly led to a wave of reforms and an injection of cash into the treatment of the mentally ill.

By 1887, Bly had established herself as a pioneer in the dangerous field of immersive investigative journalism, which remained her lifelong specialty. In 1889, after reading Around the World in Eighty Days, she pitched an idea to her editor that would   34   her reputation as a trailblazer for her sex. Supported by the World, Bly began the journey within a year, leaving New Jersey on a steamship bound for England.

Having caught whiff of the World’s round-the-world escapade, a rival publication – the Cosmopolitan – hastily commissioned another female journalist to try and beat Bly’s time. With just six hours notice, Elisabeth Bisland (aged 28) left New York on the same day as Bly, but she travelled west while the World’s champion went east. The competition   35   public interest in what was now a real race. Five days before Bisland and 72 days after leaving, Bly was back in New Jersey, having bested Fogg’s fictional journey time by over seven days.

Pat Kinsella, History Revealed

One For All

Traditional discussions of how humanity became the dominant form of life, with a population of more than eight billion and counting, have focused on competition. Our ancestors seized land, so the story goes, wiped out other species – including our brethren the Neanderthals – and hunted big predators to extinction.

Overall, however, this is an unlikely scenario. Our forebears were too small and vulnerable to rule the savannah. They must have lived in constant fear of pack-hunting hyenas, ten different kinds of big cats and other dangerous animals. We probably owe our success as a species more to our cooperativeness than our capacity for violence.

Our propensity to cooperate has old evolutionary roots. A host of recent studies have carefully documented primate cooperation, reaching three main conclusions. First, cooperation does not require family ties. Even though primates favor kin, they do not limit their cooperation to family. In fact, most close partnerships in the forest involve unrelated individuals.

Second, cooperation is often based on reciprocity. Experiments indicate that chimpanzees remember received favors. In one study, researchers found that an individual that earlier in the day had groomed another was more likely to obtain a share of food from this partner later on.

Third, cooperation may be motivated by empathy, a characteristic of all mammals, from rodents to primates. We identify with others in need, pain or distress. This identification arouses emotions that tend to prompt helping action. Scientists now believe that primates, in particular, go further and actually care about the well-being of others. Sometimes caring about others costs primates nothing, but they also help one another at a substantial cost. In nature, chimpanzees are known to adopt orphans or defend others against leopards – both extremely costly forms of altruism.

These caring tendencies in primates probably evolved from the obligatory maternal care demanded of all mammals. Whether a mouse or an elephant, mothers need to respond to their young’s signals of hunger, pain or fear. This sensitivity was then co-opted for other relationships, helping to enhance emotional bonding, empathy and cooperation within the larger society.

Cooperation affords substantial benefits. The most ubiquitous form in the animal kingdom is known as mutualistic cooperation, marked by working together toward an obvious goal that is advantageous to all – say, when hyenas bring down a wildebeest together. Such cooperation depends on well-coordinated action and shared payoffs.

This kind of cooperation can spawn more subtle cooperative behaviors such as sharing. Survival depends on sharing, which explains why both humans and animals are exquisitely sensitive to fair divisions. We owe our sense of fairness to a long history of mutualistic cooperation.

One oft-mentioned difference between humans and other primates is that we are the only species to cooperate with outsiders and strangers. Although our willingness to cooperate depends on the circumstances (after all, we may also kill those who do not belong to our group), primates in nature are mostly competitive between groups. The way human communities allow outsiders to travel through their territories, share meals with them, exchange goods and gifts, or band together against common enemies is not a typical primate pattern.

Most likely, however, cooperation among strangers is an extension of tendencies that arose for in-group use. Experiments in which capuchin monkeys and bonobos interact with unfamiliar outsiders have shown them capable of exchanging favors and sharing food. In other words, the potential for cooperating with outsiders is present in other primate species even if they rarely encounter situations in nature that prompt them to do so.

One way we may be truly unique, though, is in the highly organized nature of our cooperativeness. We have the capacity to create hierarchical collaborations that can execute large-scale projects of a complexity and magnitude not found elsewhere in nature.

Humans also have ways of enforcing cooperation that thus far have not been documented in other animals. Through repeated interactions, we build reputations as reliable friends, or poor ones, and may be punished if our efforts fall short. We know that our moral systems include expectations about cooperation and that we are hypersensitive to public opinion. These concerns over reputation could have been the primordial glue that enabled early Homo sapiens to stick together in ever larger societies.

Frans de Waal, Scientific American