Aptis ESOL General — Nivel C1

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

Had she known about the risks, she ___ the deal.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

It's high time we ___ a decision.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

The proposal was met with ___ scepticism from the board.

Lee el texto y responde. «As algorithms increasingly determine who gets a loan, a job interview or even parole, a curious asymmetry has emerged in how we scrutinise their decisions. A human loan officer who rejects an application is expected to justify the refusal in terms a customer can challenge; an algorithm, by contrast, is often treated as beyond argument, its output accepted simply because it emerged from a process too complex for most people — including, frequently, the institutions deploying it — to fully explain. This is not a matter of algorithms being inherently worse than human judgement; in many documented cases, they demonstrably reduce certain kinds of bias that plagued earlier, purely human systems. The trouble lies instead in the illusion of neutrality that mathematical process seems to confer, a veneer of objectivity that can make flawed assumptions embedded in the training data far harder to detect and contest than an individual's prejudice ever was. Addressing this will require not banning algorithmic decision-making, as some campaigners demand, but insisting on a level of explainability that currently few systems, and fewer institutions, seem willing to provide.»

What is the author's main argument about algorithmic decisions?

Lee el texto y responde. «Every generation, it seems, produces commentators convinced that the language is being ruined by the one that follows it — a complaint that has been recorded, in one form or another, since at least the eighteenth century, when contemporaries condemned changes in English that are today considered entirely unremarkable. What these critics rarely acknowledge is that the features they defend as timeless correctness were themselves once innovations that earlier purists resisted. This is not to say that all linguistic change is equally welcome, or that clarity in communication doesn't matter; a shift that genuinely obscures meaning is a fair target for concern. But much of what provokes complaint — a new use of a familiar word, a grammatical structure borrowed from another dialect, the rise of a slang term into mainstream use — reflects language doing exactly what it has always done: adapting to the needs of the people who speak it. Treating a snapshot of usage from one's own youth as a permanent standard says rather more about nostalgia than it does about grammar.»

What is the author's attitude towards complaints about declining language standards?