Università degli studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”
Dipartimento di Ricerca e Innovazione Umanistica
Corso di Laurea in Lingue, Culture e Letterature Moderne (L11)
Esame scritto di Lingua e Traduzione – Lingua Inglese II
(Commissione: A. Monaco – P. Carroll – M. Gatto – A. Bianco)
A.A. 2023/2024 – 17th January 2025
Cognome _________________________ Nome_________________________ Matr.__________
This exam paper contains four tasks:
A. Reading comprehension and summary writing
B. Reformulation exercise (four sentences to reformulate)
C. Translation from English to Italian
D. Translation from Italian to English
Time allowed: 4 hours. You can use both English and Italian monolingual
dictionaries. Please write in pen, not pencil.
***
A. Read the article below and write a summary in your own words:
‘Are young people’s attention spans really shrinking? It’s
more complex than you might think
Distractions long predated today’s fast-moving online world. Understanding
this age-old problem could help us regain control
In late-19th-century Britain, Londoners could expect to receive up to 12 postal
deliveries a day. Letters were often exchanged with the frequency that we
imagine only occurred with the advent of email. Today, archives brim with
scrawled missives detailing arrangements to meet for dinner that are made first
thing in the morning, only to be followed by an argument unfolding in the middle
of the day, culminating in a reconciliation and reinstatement of the plan to meet.
All before nightfall.
We tend to think of the pre-digital era as much the same as now but
without our myriad digital distractions, but it was not so. With the doormat
filling up with mail every hour or so, even a gentleman or woman of leisure
might have been forgiven for feeling rather distracted.
Distraction is claimed to be the underlying+cognitive crisis of the digital
age, and there is clearly a lot of very real, and justifiable, concern for younger
generations.
Little surprise then, perhaps, that in a recent+
piece in the Atlantic
,
headlined “The elite college students who can’t read books”, assistant editor
Rose Horowitch reports that these days university “students have trouble
staying focused on even a sonnet”. She reports that many middle and high
schools in the US have turned away from literary texts in favour of short
passages to enable the better teaching and testing of information skills that are
directly relevant to the workplace.
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