Cambridge English — Nivel C1 (Advanced (CAE))

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

___ had the show started than the fire alarm rang.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

It's about time you ___ that report.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

He's known ___ his generosity.

Lee el texto y responde. «The belief that certain people are simply better at multitasking than others has proven remarkably resistant to the mounting evidence against it. What most people experience as parallel attention, cognitive research suggests, is in fact rapid switching between tasks, each switch carrying a small but real cost in accuracy and speed that accumulates into a measurable dent in output. A small minority of so-called supertaskers do appear to defy this pattern in laboratory conditions, but they are rare enough that basing workplace expectations on their existence borders on the irresponsible. None of this has done much to dent the popularity of open-plan offices designed around the assumption of fluid, simultaneous attention, nor the expectation, common in many jobs, that employees remain reachable across multiple channels at once. The gap between what cognitive science has established and what workplace culture continues to assume shows few signs of narrowing, perhaps because acknowledging the science would require redesigning far more than most organisations are currently willing to fund, from physical office layouts to the informal expectations placed on staff outside working hours.»

What does the author suggest about the gap between science and workplace culture on multitasking?

Lee el texto y responde. «Linguists have long observed that the prestige attached to a way of speaking has remarkably little to do with any inherent quality of the speech itself, and a great deal to do with the social status of whoever happens to speak it. A pronunciation feature dismissed as careless in one community can, in another context, be marketed as charming or authentic, the only real variable being who is doing the talking and who is doing the judging. This asymmetry becomes particularly visible when a stigmatised way of speaking is gradually adopted by more privileged groups, at which point commentary about its supposed sloppiness tends to quietly disappear, replaced by descriptions of it as distinctive or characterful. None of this is to say that clarity in communication is unimportant, but the line so often drawn between 'proper' and 'improper' English maps far more reliably onto class and power than onto anything a linguist would recognise as a meaningful distinction in grammar.»

What point does the author make about how a speech feature is judged?