Critical reading

Content

Practical exercises – Intended audience

Task 1

Consider the following texts. First decide which text type/source they correspond to and then consider their potential audience:

specific audience
general public
both

	A. Yoga has become the latest wellness practice to fall victim to cultural appropriation – but that will come as no surprise to the many industry insiders who have been speaking out on this issue for years, with growing urgency. What is abundantly clear to me as a yoga teacher is the practice has been led astray by western economic forces. Cultural appropriation remains a contentious and triggering topic for some. “What’s the difference between appropriation and appreciation?” I’m often asked. People argue that it’s a fine line, but I fail to see it. It’s just one of the problems plaguing the industry. Working as a yoga teacher in London has shown me just how far the practice has been pulled from its roots. Yoga was simply not designed as a quick workout or to be reduced to #LiveYourBestLife Instagrammable content. It was never meant to fit into a power hour on your lunch break, or as something to be combined with beer or puppies – as some classes do, charging an eye-watering £35 for the privilege. Yoga in the west has been so heavily commodified that “Namastay in bed” T-shirts and tattoos of decontextualised Sanskrit and Hindu gods have become commonplace. Bindis – an auspicious religious symbol with Hindu origins – are worn as fashion accessories, alongside bum-sculpting activewear.
	B. In the era of precision cosmology, an instrumental approach to test cosmological models is to compare the Hubble constant determined from different methods, especially from locally and at the early universe. There have been efforts on both fronts, for example, from the distance ladder methods (Riess et al. 2022 using Cepheids, and Freedman 2021 using TRGB stars), the strong lensing time-delays (Wong et al. 2020), and results from cosmic microwave background experiments such as Planck (Planck Collaboration et al. 2020). There are various discrepancies among the results, pointing to possible underestimated systematics in the methods themselves or hinting of new physics. As one of the closest spiral galaxies in the Local Group, M33 provides tremendous leverage to study its stellar content. Its proximity allows us to resolve brighter variable star populations with ground-based telescopes. With a simple geometry and as a face-on galaxy, we can treat all the M33 stars as at the same distance. In addition, M33 is a metal-rich environment compared to the Magellanic Clouds and other dwarf galaxies and can be used to study metallicity influence on the properties of variables (see, e.g., Scowcroft et al. 2009).
	C. It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol. I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days. The crew were already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious war which lasted all the way from Earth.
	D. All societies face the problem of scarcity. They differ considerably, however, in the way they tackle the problem. One important difference between societies is in the degree of government control of the economy: the extent to which government decides ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘for whom’ to produce. At the one extreme lies the completely planned or command economy, where all the economic decisions are taken by the government. At the other extreme lies the completely free-market economy. In this type of economy there is no government intervention at all. All decisions are taken by individuals and firms. Households decide how much labour and other factors to supply, and what goods to consume. Firms decide what goods to produce and what factors to employ. The pattern of production and consumption that results depends on the interactions of all these individual demand and supply decisions in free markets. In practice, all economies are a mixture of the two; it is the degree of government intervention that distinguishes different economic systems. The government plays a large role in China, whereas in the USA the government plays a much smaller role. It is still useful to analyse the extremes, in order to put the different mixed economies of the real world into perspective. The mixture of government and the market can be shown by the use of a spectrum diagram such as Figure 1.6. It shows where particular economies of the real world lie along the spectrum between the two extremes.
	E. In the aftermath of civil war, Spain witnessed a period known as the ‘Years of Hunger’, which would extend throughout the postwar years (1939–52). The dictatorship would lay the blame on external factors, although the causes for the collapse of living conditions and food supply over that time lay in its autarkic policies. This article attempts to show that Spain was victim of a famine as a consequence of the economic policies of the Franco dictatorship. To analyse the Spanish case, we rely on the conceptual framework of famine studies throughout history. We will demonstrate that Spain suffered an extreme socio-economic crisis during the 1940s, but that it was not until late 1939 and 1942, as well as 1946, that a true famine took place. In order to characterise and explain it, we will analyse three different aspects: the rise in the cost of living, the spread of infectious diseases and death by starvation. Sources: Blanco, M. Á. del A. (2021). Famine in Spain During Franco’s Dictatorship, 1939–52. Journal of Contemporary History, 56(1), 3–27; Sloman J., et al. Economics, 9^th edition, Pearson Education Ltd. 2015, p.18-19; www.theguardian.com; https://iopscience.iop.org/; Arthur C. Clarke, The nine billion names of God, NY: Signet/NAL, 1974.

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