Всероссийская олимпиада школьников по английскому языку 2010-11 год

Всероссийская олимпиада школьников по английскому языку 2010-11 год

окружной (муниципальный тур) - 9-11 класс

A friend of mine was a penniless student at university in 1985 when she started to go out with a man who lived in an oil-rich eastern state. To all her friends he seemed like the possessor of boundless riches, not least because he gave her a mobile phone so that he could contact her at any point of her day directly from his home country. Although virtually none of us had ever seen a mobile phone, the overriding reaction was, ‘What a waste of money ringing all that way’ as opposed to, ‘Wow, that’s brilliant.’ From their earliest incarnations, these telephones have never had the capacity to thrill us in the way that other new bits of technology can. Sighs of contempt, rather than envy, would be breathed in all the first-class train carriages where mobiles started ringing in the late 1980s.

By the mid 1990s, the mobile was no longer the preserve of image-conscious businessmen. Suddenly, it seemed, every petty criminal could be seen organising their dodgy deals as they shouted into stolen ones in the street. It was at this point that I bought a mobile. I had been sneering for years , but I reasoned that as everyone now had one, surely no-one would be offended or irritated by mine, as long as I used it exclusively in the back of taxis or other places where I could avoid intruding on people’s mental privacy.

But I immediately grew to depend on it and constantly checked that I had it, in the way that habitual smokers are said to keep checking for their cigarettes. And it affected my behavior. Without the means of ringing ahead to say I was going to be late, for example, would I have set off for my business appointment with so little time to spare? I began to understand how those inexperienced walkers come to call out the Mountain Rescue Team from the top of some perilous peak. Without the false sense of security the phone in their pocket provided, they wouldn’t have gone up there in the first place.

What’s more, after a while, I realised that once it has got a hold on you, all telephone calls are urgent in exact proportion to the availability of a mobile to announce them. Because our modern lives have so much capacity for urgency, the mobile is turning into an enemy rather than a helpmate. It is enabling us to dash from one activity to another in the mistaken belief that we can still be in touch – with work, with other family members. Yet, although we are constantly on standby, we are not in a position to be fully engaged with anything else. No mental commitment to the task in hand is possible when the mobile can ring at any moment with another demand for our attention, no matter how legitimate. In this way, I began to feel persecuted rather than liberated.

And mobiles may be even more sinister than any of us could have dreamt. When activated, it seems, they serve as miniature tracking devices which, unknown to their owners, reveal their whereabouts at any given time, even if no calls are made or received. In a recent murder trial, the police showed that the suspect travelled to and from the murder scene, despite his having denied this, through using the computer records of his mobile’s whereabouts.

But what has really put me off my phone is a conversation I had with a terrifyingly important man – one of the most conspicuously successful in Britain. He had been to dinner the night before with two other such figures. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘they sat there taking calls all through dinner.’ What a let down. In my book, importance is denoted not by a ringing mobile, but rather by the ability to build up the kind of efficient and trustworthy support team that ensures you never to need to take an urgent call in public. One suspects moreover, that it is the very existence of the mobile phone that prevents effective delegation in such situations, that it represents a menace rather than a convenience.