Text 7A3-II 

    400 million people speak English as their first language; another 1.4 billion as a second tongue. Born 1,600 years ago among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, English became global. A new exhibition at the British Library, named Evolving English, traces for the first time the incredible journey launched by the Frisians, Saxons, Angles and Jutes who sailed to southeast England, and whose descendants created the Vespasian Psalter in the eighth century. From the Vespasian Psalter the journey moves on through England’s early literary heroes, Beowulf, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and on to Jonathan Swift.

    The curators of Evolving English have been clever to focus not just on English at school and English at work, but English at play, from spoonerisms to malapropisms, puns and palindromes and the 1,800 words invented by William Shakespeare — among them “green-eyed”, “go-between”, “well-read” and “zany”. Not only was Shakespeare the greatest English writer, he could have been no other kind.

Internet: (<www.economist.com> (adapted).  

Text 7A3-I  

    As a science fiction writer, Octavia Butler forged a new path and envisioned bold possibilities. The future she wrote about is now our present moment. She wrote 12 novels and won each of science fiction’s highest honors. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. She is also, increasingly, a writer recognized as one of the most important voices and visionaries of the 20^th century, and now the 21^st. As a Black woman and a writer, Butler demolished walls that seemed impermeable, writing on themes that seemed uncategorizable. Her ideas and characters continue to resonate with new readers when so many are looking for, if not hope, then a map for a way forward.

    Her vision about the climate crisis, political and societal upheaval and the brutality and consequences of power hierarchies seems both sobering and prescient. However, as Butler often noted, being right was never the point. She didn’t want to be right — far from it. She wanted to give us time, and tools, to correct the course. 

 Lynell George. The Visions of Octavia Butler. Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted). 

The mysterious death of Alexander the Great

    When Alexander the Great’s body seemingly remained unchanged for six days after his death in 323 BCE, his contemporaries could offer only one explanation. Alexander must have been a god. So… was he?

    Alexander the Great first fell ill during a days-long series of parties, during one of which he collapsed, complaining of a searing pain in his back. After 10 days of intense fever, Alexander’s soldiers were brought in to see him one final time. As reported by the historian Arrian, at that point the king “could no longer speak… but he struggled to raise his head and gave each man a greeting with his eyes.”

    When Alexander was declared dead on June 13, theories began forming. Had he been poisoned? Sabotaged? Had he been killed by drinking too much wine? Today we have an explanation for Alexander’s death and his period of bodily freshness that relies less on the supernatural and more on science. In 2018 Dr. Katherine Hall, a lecturer in New Zealand, proposed that Alexander the Great had Guillain-Barré syndrome, an acute autoimmune condition that results in muscle paralysis. In other words, Alexander may have been alive when he was declared dead—a mistake that could have been made when physicians mistook the shallow breathing of a coma patient for no breathing at all. If this was the case, Alexander may have been effectively murdered during embalming—a process that would have seen him disemboweled.

    While we can’t travel back in time to confirm Hall’s theory, it is the only one that takes into account all the details of Alexander’s death—and his body’s mysterious life.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Adaptation