Aptis ESOL General — Nivel C2

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

Rarely ___ such a compelling argument.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

No sooner ___ the building than the fire alarm went off.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

She's not averse ___ working weekends if it's necessary.

Lee el texto y responde. «Nowhere is the modern hunger for authenticity more visibly, and more paradoxically, on display than in the tourism industry that has grown up to supply it. Travellers increasingly reject anything that smells of the manufactured experience — the guided tour, the souvenir shop, the restaurant with a menu in six languages — in favour of something billed as unmediated contact with 'real' local life. Yet the very act of seeking out authenticity tends to dissolve it: a neighbourhood market visited chiefly because it hasn't yet been discovered by outsiders ceases, the moment it is discovered, to be quite what it was, and often begins reshaping itself, consciously or not, around the expectations of the visitors it now draws. The fishing village becomes a set piece performing 'fishing village' for an audience; the family-run café adds a laminated English menu and, eventually, the wifi password on a chalkboard. None of this makes the experience worthless, nor does it make the people involved somehow less genuine for adapting to new circumstances, as some more censorious critics of tourism seem to imply. But it does suggest that authenticity, at least as tourists tend to imagine it, was always something closer to a mirage than a destination: visible from a distance, and receding at exactly the pace one approaches it.»

What paradox does the author identify about the search for authenticity in tourism?

Lee el texto y responde. «Attention, an economist might point out, is simply another scarce resource, and scarce resources get priced, traded and fought over like any other. What is unusual about the current fight for attention is how little the person supplying it — the reader scrolling, the viewer watching — is aware of being a party to the transaction at all. Every additional second spent on a feed is logged, valued and sold onward to advertisers, a fact obscured by the absence of any moment resembling a till receipt. Critics who describe this arrangement as a form of extraction are not being merely rhetorical: attention, once spent, cannot be spent twice, and the hours a person hands over to an infinitely scrolling feed are, definitionally, hours unavailable for anything else, including the sustained concentration that more demanding forms of thought seem to require. Defenders of the attention economy respond that the exchange is not so one-sided as critics suggest, since users receive entertainment, connection and information in return, freely chosen and, in principle, freely withdrawn from. Both positions contain some truth, which is perhaps precisely why the debate shows little sign of resolving itself.»

What is the author's overall stance on the debate about the attention economy?