Cambridge English — Nivel C2 (Proficiency (CPE))

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

Were it not ___ his help, we would have failed.

Elige la opción correcta para completar la frase.

She is, by all accounts, a woman ___ integrity.

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The negotiations broke down, ___ many had predicted.

Lee el texto y responde. «There is a particular kind of confidence that tends to peak not at the height of genuine mastery but somewhere in the foothills, among those who have learned enough to feel capable but not enough to appreciate how much remains unknown. Genuine experts, by contrast, are disproportionately represented among the most hedged and qualified speakers on any subject, not from false modesty but because sustained exposure to a field's difficulties tends to erode the certainty that non-specialists retain by default. This creates an awkward asymmetry in public discourse: the confident amateur is, by temperament, simply more persuasive to a general audience than the hedging specialist, regardless of which one is more likely to be correct. Institutions that reward decisiveness — media, certain corners of politics, parts of the business world — end up structurally favouring the amateur's register over the expert's, not through any conspiracy but through a simple mismatch between what sounds authoritative and what actually reflects a deep, appropriately uncertain understanding of a complicated subject.»

What asymmetry does the author identify in public discourse?

Lee el texto y responde. «Irony has become so thoroughly the default register of online communication that sincerity now requires active signalling to be believed at all, a reversal of the older assumption that statements are sincere unless marked otherwise. This has practical consequences beyond the merely stylistic: genuine enthusiasm, undefended by any protective layer of jokey detachment, risks being read as either naive or, worse, as itself an ironic pose one level further removed. Cultural critics disagree about whether this represents a symptom of genuine cynicism or simply a defensive social strategy adopted by a generation acutely aware of being watched and judged at scale, for whom irony functions as a kind of plausible deniability. What seems clear, whichever explanation one favours, is that the register is not cost-free: something is lost when every statement must be interpretable as a joke before it can safely be interpreted as anything else, and sincerity, once the default, becomes instead a deliberate and slightly risky choice.»

According to the text, what has become the 'default register' of online communication, changing how sincerity must be expressed?