Anyone know if this was the paper? Maybe adapted? She´s a political writer so I don´t think it was ideal. I knew it would besomething universal, that affects us all, and they´ve done parenting, obesity, internet/libraries, but it is still a bit dry!
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Is your journey really necessary? Who would have thought that, in the absence of world war and in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, the state would be telling us not to travel?
Just as ordinary working people had begun to enjoy the freedoms that the better-off have known for generations - the experience of other cultures, other cuisines, other climates - they are threatened with having those liberating possibilities priced out of their reach.
Perhaps there is still a bit of the Marxist agitator in me: when I hear rich people trying to deny enlightenment and pleasure to poor people, I reach for my megaphone.
Maybe Kevin Tattoo and his mates do use cheap flights to the sunshine as an extension of their binge-drinking opportunities, but for thousands of people whose parents would never have ventured beyond Blackpool or Southend, air travel has been a social revelation.
The environment may or may not be at risk from those multitudes of ordinary Britons who can now afford to escape regularly from their parochial isolation and the narrow-minded ignorance that goes with it.
But before we give the eco-lobby the unconditional benefit of the doubt, can we just look at the balance sheet?
It is not just air travel for the poor that the green tax lobby is engineering: it is a restriction on any mobility. Clamping down on one form of movement, as the glib reformers have discovered, simply creates intolerable pressure on the others.
Londoners had just become accustomed to the idea that they would have to pay an £8 congestion charge to drive into their own city when they discovered that the fares on commuter rail and underground services had been hiked up with the intention of driving away customers from the public transport system - now grossly overcrowded as a result of people having been forced off the roads by the congestion charge.
The only solution - and I am just waiting for the politicians to recommend it explicitly - is for none of us to go anywhere. Stay at home and save the planet.
The logical conclusion is a retreat from all the things that make metropolitan existence worthwhile: all the social, professional and cultural interactions that free mobility makes possible - and which, since the Renaissance, have made great cities the centres of intellectual progress.
But even devising a way of making a living while never leaving your house will not absolve you of your ecological guilt if you make free use of the technology that has transformed domestic life.
The working classes, having only discovered in the last generation the comforts of a tolerable degree of warmth and plentiful hot water, are now being told that these things must be rationed or prohibitively taxed.
Never mind that the universal presence of adequate heating has almost eliminated those perennial scourges of the poor, bronchitis and pneumonia, which once took the very young and the very old in huge numbers every winter.
Never mind that the generous use of hot water and detergent, particularly when combined in a washing machine for the laundering of bed linen and clothing, has virtually eliminated the infestations of body lice, fleas (which once carried plague) and scabies mites that used to be a commonplace feature of poverty.
Or that the dishwasher - detested by green activists for its "wasteful" use of water and energy - which cleans crockery and utensils at a high enough temperature to destroy bacteria, has improved hygiene to such an extent that occasional outbreaks of serious food poisoning are now newsworthy.
Or, for that matter, that the private car, the Green Public Enemy Number One, has given ordinary families freedom and flexibility that would have been inconceivable in previous generations.
If politicians are planning restrictions on these "polluting" aspects of private life, to be enforced by a price mechanism, they had better accept they will be reconstructing a class divide that will drastically affect the quality of life of those on the wrong side of it.
It is certainly possible that the premises of the environmental campaigners are sound: that we are in mortal danger from global warming and that this is a result of human activity.
I do not have the scientific expertise to judge their arguments. What I do have is some knowledge of intellectual history and when I listen to the ecological warnings, I am reminded of an earlier doomsday scenario.
In his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Thomas Malthus demonstrated in what appeared to be indisputable mathematical terms that population growth would exceed the limits of food sup
Kayakah!
This was passage 1, I left them on my desk yesterday, but there was deinately a question about what was meant by the term "doomsday scenario" and to put in to own words what was included in the doomsday scenario. It was a good paper, lots of understanding questions and only 1 5 marker and 1 4 marker, whcih was really 2 marks each on sentence structure and word choice.
Orignal From: Higher English 09 Close Reading passage 1?
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