Inglese

ESAME DI STATO DI LICEO LINGUISTICO

Tema di: LINGUA STRANIERA

TESTO LETTERARIO– LINGUA INGLESE

(comprensione e produzione in lingua straniera)

…It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston

Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the wild wind, slipped

quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to

prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured

poster, too large for indoor display, had been tackled to the wall. It depicted simply an

enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a

heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It

was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at

present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy

drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who

was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting

several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the

enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived

that the eyes follow about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the

caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do

with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a

dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a

switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The

instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed but there was no way of

shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the

meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform

of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by

coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street

little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals and though the sun

was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except

the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down

from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately

opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes

looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,

flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word

INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for

an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the

police patrol, snooping into the people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however.

Only the Thought Police mattered...

Il testo è tratto da George ORWELL, “Nineteen Eighty-four”

ESAME DI STATO DI LICEO LINGUISTICO

Tema di: LINGUA STRANIERA

TESTO LETTERARIO– LINGUA INGLESE

(comprensione e produzione in lingua straniera)

1. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

Where is Winston Smith’s flat situated?

1.1.

1.2. Why cannot he use the lift?

1.3. What kind of pictures is the one shown on the poster?

What did Winston Smith hear when he entered the flat?

1.4.

1.5. What is the “telescreen” and why is there one in each flat?

1.6. Could it be turned off?

1.7. What are “telescreens” for?

1.8. How does the police patrol carry out its task?

SUMMARIZE the content of the passage.

2. Composition: “Can new technologies become oppressive of individual liberties?

3. Discuss.”

_____________________________

Durata massima della prova: 6 ore.

È consentito l’uso dei dizionari monolingue e bilingue.

Non è consentito lasciare l’Istituto prima che siano trascorse 3 ore dalla dettatura del tema.

ESAME DI STATO DI LICEO LINGUISTICO

Tema di: LINGUA STRANIERA

TESTO DI ATTUALITÀ – LINGUA INGLESE

(comprensione e produzione in lingua straniera)

The Internet and the law

The Internet was supposed to be all about freedom. That is why governments want to regulate it.

It is far from certain whether freedom, or government control, will win the day

In 1967 Roy Bates, a retired British army major, occupied an island fortress six miles off the

English coast and declared it a sovereign nation. He was never sure what to do with his

Principality of Sealand. Now, however, the fortress may have found its calling. For several

months, a firm called HavenCo has been operating a data centre there. Anyone who wants to

keep a website or other data out of the reach of national governments can rent space on the

servers that hum in one of the concrete pillars.

In the mid-1990s, Sealand would have been seen as yet more proof that the Internet cannot be

regulated. If a country tried to censor digital content, the data would simply hop to a more

liberal jurisdiction. These days, the data principality symbolises just the opposite: the days of

unrestricted freedom on the Internet are numbered, except, perhaps, in odd places like Sealand.

It seems likely that 2000 will be remembered as the year when governments started to regulate

cyberspace in earnest; and forgot, in the process, that the reason the worldwide network became

such an innovative force at all was a healthy mix of self-regulation and no regulation. In Britain,

the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act now gives the police broad access to e-mail and

other online communications. South Korea has outlawed access to gambling websites. The

United States has passed a law requiring schools and libraries that receive federal funds for

Internet connections to install software on their computers to block material harmful to the

young.

This year, governments are turning their attention to the many jurisdictional problems created

by the Internet. These have been emphasised by a French ruling against Yahoo! on November

th

20 . The French court ordered the Internet portal firm to find some way of banning French users

from seeing the Nazi memorabilia posted on its American sites, or face a daily fine of

FFr100,000 ($13,000) from the end of February. Yahoo! is fighting the case, even though it has

now stopped sales of Nazi memorabilia.

The case could be a taste of things to come. Under a new EU law, for example, European

consumers may now sue EU-based Internet sites in their own countries, and the rule may well

be extended internationally. The United States has just endorsed the gist of the Council of

Europe’s cybercrime treaty, which aims to harmonise laws against hacking, Internet fraud and

child pornography.