Vademecum matura - język angielski

ROZUMIENIE TEKSTU CZYTANEGO 169 Zadanie tego typu sprawdza różne umiejętności, np. umiejętność wyszukiwania szczegó- łowych informacji, oddzielania faktów od opinii, określania głównej myśli tekstu oraz okre- ślania intencji autora lub kontekstu wypowiedzi. Z A D AN I E 1 Przeczytaj tekst. Z podanych odpowiedzi wybierz właściwą, zgodną z treścią tekstu. Zakreśl literę A, B, C lub D. – How is the Dictionary getting on? – said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise in the canteen. – Slowly – said Syme. – I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating. He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. – We’re getting the language into its final shape – the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. – It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take „good”, for instance. If you have a word like „good”, what need is there for a word like „bad”? „Un- good” will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of „good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of useless words like „excellent” and „splendid” and all the rest of them? „Plusgood” covers the meaning; or „doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was Big Brother’s idea originally, of course – he added as an afterthought. – Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting him- self to speak. Syme went on: – Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, the entire population will have been using Newspeak for nearly two generations? Not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? By 2050 all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like „freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In