Sujet du Bac Anglais 2025 · Métropole

Document A

Isabel has just left home to go to work. She is at Grand Central station in New York.

Isabel should be in the office. She’s on her way. She is merely taking some extra time getting there from Grand Central.

Until this morning, she’s never walked unhastily through the Grand Central concourse. She’s always been in a rush to get to work, to get home again—and she realizes, as she walks slowly among the other travelers, that with the exception of student backpackers and baffled tourists, you are expected by Grand Central to be passing through on your way to urgent business elsewhere.

You are not encouraged to linger. There are no benches. There is no waiting room. Grand Central implies, with its august enormity and its unaccountable hush (people are, Isabel supposes, too rushed to make noise), that there is only motion, that your destination may promise rest and respite but here, in this monument to transit, you’d better keep moving.

Isabel pauses below the departure board.

9:45 Dobbs Ferry

10:01 Manitou

10:11 Cold Spring

What if she were the kind of person who could get on a train bound for an unfamiliar destination, who could vanish like the mythical man who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and is never heard from again? She considers what it would be like to be able to abandon all her gifts, all that’s been lavished upon her; to be that careless and callous; to abandon everyone and get on a train. Someone who could shed a life as if it were an old coat, who could find her way to another life without having to suffer the recriminations: subject to a form of reincarnation, the kind that allows people (some, there must be some such people) to rent an apartment in a small town on the Hudson, to become a waitress in a diner, wearing a nametag that bears the name you’ve given yourself. Pearl, or Jasmine or Naomi.

Michael CUNNINGHAM, Day, 2023

Document B

Eilis, an Irish American woman, her Italian American husband Tony, and their children are having a family lunch at Tony’s parents’ place with his brothers Enzo and Frank.

When, a few years earlier, the television had been showing news of student marches and sit-ins against the war in Vietnam, Eilis’s father-in-law had denounced the protestors and said that the police had been too lenient on them.

‘But aren’t they very brave, the protestors?’ Eilis asked.

‘I would like to see them all in uniform,’ her father-in-law said.

‘I would hate a son of mine having to go to war,’ Eilis said, ‘so I think they are protesting for me.’

By the time, most of the children had gone out to play. Tony put his head down. Enzo made signs to Eilis that she should stop.

‘I can’t think of anything that would make me more proud,’ her father-in-law said.

‘To have a son or a grandson in the war?’ she asked, looking at Frank whom she had heard denouncing the war many times.

‘Fighting for this country. That’s what I said. It would make me proud.’

Eilis hoped that someone else would speak. For a second, she thought it best to say nothing more but then she felt a flash of anger at Tony and Frank for not supporting her.

‘That is not an opinion many people would share,’ she said.

‘Do you mean Irish People?’ her father-in-law asked.

‘I mean Americans.’

‘What do you know about Americans?’

‘I am as American as you are. My children are Americans. And I would not want my son to be sent to fight in Vietnam.’

She looked directly at her father-in-law, forcing him to avert his eyes.

Enzo interrupted first by making a sound under his breath that rose into ‘Whoa’ and then became louder. He pointed at Eilis.

‘Keep quiet, you!’

Everyone watched Eilis except Tony and Frank who kept their heads down.

Francesca eventually, stood up.

‘I think it’s a day for grappa,’ she said.

‘We will all have a little something with our coffee. Now can someone help me get the glasses?’

Even though it was her turn to help, Eilis did not move. Both Lena and Clara seemed relieved to be able to stand up from the table.

‘Can you not control her?’ Enzo asked, as though she wasn’t there. […]

On the walk back to their house, with Rosella and Larry 1 coming behind them, Eilis felt almost sorry for Tony. Clearly, he should have supported her at the table, or moved the conversation to some other topic. But he could not go against his father.

Colm TÓIBÍN, Long Island, 2024

1 Rosella and Larry: Eilis and Tony’s children.

Document C

Partie 1: Synthèse du dossier, en anglais (16 points)

Prenez connaissance de la thématique (« Expression et construction de soi ») et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ):

Paying particular attention to the characteristics of the documents, show how they interact to explore women's place in the American society.

Document A

Isabel has just left home to go to work. She is at Grand Central station in New York.

Isabel should be in the office. She’s on her way. She is merely taking some extra time getting there from Grand Central.

Until this morning, she’s never walked unhastily through the Grand Central concourse. She’s always been in a rush to get to work, to get home again—and she realizes, as she walks slowly among the other travelers, that with the exception of student backpackers and baffled tourists, you are expected by Grand Central to be passing through on your way to urgent business elsewhere.

You are not encouraged to linger. There are no benches. There is no waiting room. Grand Central implies, with its august enormity and its unaccountable hush (people are, Isabel supposes, too rushed to make noise), that there is only motion, that your destination may promise rest and respite but here, in this monument to transit, you’d better keep moving.

Isabel pauses below the departure board.

9:45 Dobbs Ferry

10:01 Manitou

10:11 Cold Spring

What if she were the kind of person who could get on a train bound for an unfamiliar destination, who could vanish like the mythical man who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and is never heard from again? She considers what it would be like to be able to abandon all her gifts, all that’s been lavished upon her; to be that careless and callous; to abandon everyone and get on a train. Someone who could shed a life as if it were an old coat, who could find her way to another life without having to suffer the recriminations: subject to a form of reincarnation, the kind that allows people (some, there must be some such people) to rent an apartment in a small town on the Hudson, to become a waitress in a diner, wearing a nametag that bears the name you’ve given yourself. Pearl, or Jasmine or Naomi.

Michael CUNNINGHAM, Day, 2023

Document B

Eilis, an Irish American woman, her Italian American husband Tony, and their children are having a family lunch at Tony’s parents’ place with his brothers Enzo and Frank.

When, a few years earlier, the television had been showing news of student marches and sit-ins against the war in Vietnam, Eilis’s father-in-law had denounced the protestors and said that the police had been too lenient on them.

‘But aren’t they very brave, the protestors?’ Eilis asked.

‘I would like to see them all in uniform,’ her father-in-law said.

‘I would hate a son of mine having to go to war,’ Eilis said, ‘so I think they are protesting for me.’

By the time, most of the children had gone out to play. Tony put his head down. Enzo made signs to Eilis that she should stop.

‘I can’t think of anything that would make me more proud,’ her father-in-law said.

‘To have a son or a grandson in the war?’ she asked, looking at Frank whom she had heard denouncing the war many times.

‘Fighting for this country. That’s what I said. It would make me proud.’

Eilis hoped that someone else would speak. For a second, she thought it best to say nothing more but then she felt a flash of anger at Tony and Frank for not supporting her.

‘That is not an opinion many people would share,’ she said.

‘Do you mean Irish People?’ her father-in-law asked.

‘I mean Americans.’

‘What do you know about Americans?’

‘I am as American as you are. My children are Americans. And I would not want my son to be sent to fight in Vietnam.’

She looked directly at her father-in-law, forcing him to avert his eyes.

Enzo interrupted first by making a sound under his breath that rose into ‘Whoa’ and then became louder. He pointed at Eilis.

‘Keep quiet, you!’

Everyone watched Eilis except Tony and Frank who kept their heads down.

Francesca eventually, stood up.

‘I think it’s a day for grappa,’ she said.

‘We will all have a little something with our coffee. Now can someone help me get the glasses?’

Even though it was her turn to help, Eilis did not move. Both Lena and Clara seemed relieved to be able to stand up from the table.

‘Can you not control her?’ Enzo asked, as though she wasn’t there. […]

On the walk back to their house, with Rosella and Larry 1 coming behind them, Eilis felt almost sorry for Tony. Clearly, he should have supported her at the table, or moved the conversation to some other topic. But he could not go against his father.

Colm TÓIBÍN, Long Island, 2024

1 Rosella and Larry: Eilis and Tony’s children.

Document C

Partie 2: Traduction, en français (4 points)

Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document A (lignes 1 à 7):

Isabel should be in the office. She’s on her way. She is merely taking some extra time getting there from Grand Central.

Until this morning, she’s never walked unhastily through the Grand Central concourse. She’s always been in a rush to get to work, to get home again—and she realizes, as she walks slowly among the other travelers, that with the exception of student backpackers and baffled tourists, you are expected by Grand Central to be passing through on your way to urgent business elsewhere.

Sujet 2 — Thématique: « Voyages, territoires, frontières »

Partie 1: Synthèse du dossier, en anglais (16 points)

Document A

The air did not smell of chocolate, but chocolate was in the air. Nobody needed to put a name on the factory that stood at the heart of the village. They simply called it 'the Works'. And inside this factory, they made chocolate. They'd been making chocolate there for more than sixty years. John Cadbury had opened his first shop in the centre of Birmingham back in 1824, selling ground cocoa beans for hot drinking chocolate; a devout Quaker 1, like his brothers, he sold the drink not only as a nutritious component of breakfast, but as a healthy substitute for alcohol late in the day. The business had grown steadily, the workforce had expanded, bigger premises had been acquired and then, in 1879 his sons decided to move production out of Birmingham altogether. The area they chose largely consisted, at the time, of sloping meadowland. Their vision: industry and nature existing in harmony, symbiotic, co-dependent. At first the factory was small. A one-storey red-bricked building, flooded with light on three sides by generous windows that allowed views onto the green spaces all around. Next to the factory were placed sports fields, gardens, and a children's playground. From here, the city centre seemed remote. This place called itself a village and it felt like a village. Workers had to travel from miles around, arriving at the railway station that in those days was still known as Stirchley Street. This arrangement could not continue for long, given that by the end of the nineteenth century the number of people employed at the Works had risen from two hundred to more than two and a half thousand. In 1895 the company acquired more of the land surrounding the factory buildings, and soon the workers could enjoy further recreation grounds and a cricket pitch. But the Cadbury family's ambition went beyond that. They imagined houses; affordable houses, well-built houses, houses with deep gardens where trees could flourish and vegetables could be grown. Quakerism, as before, was at the heart of their project and their goal was "the amelioration of the conditions of the working class and labouring population in and around Birmingham by the provision of improved dwellings, with gardens and opened spaces to be enjoyed therewith".

Jonathan COE, Bournville, 2022

1 Quaker: member of a Protestant religious group.

Document B

Ebenezer HOWARD, Advertisement for Welwyn Garden City, 1920

Document C

Coketown 1, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black […]. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled 2. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. […]

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there – as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple 3 over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end.

Charles DICKENS, Hard Times, 1854

1 Coketown: a fictitious town, situated in the North of England.

2 never got uncoiled: never stopped coming out of the chimneys.

3 a square steeple: a church tower.

Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ):

Paying particular attention to the characteristics of the three documents, show how they interact to illustrate the impact of industrialization in the United Kingdom.

Document A

The air did not smell of chocolate, but chocolate was in the air. Nobody needed to put a name on the factory that stood at the heart of the village. They simply called it 'the Works'. And inside this factory, they made chocolate. They'd been making chocolate there for more than sixty years. John Cadbury had opened his first shop in the centre of Birmingham back in 1824, selling ground cocoa beans for hot drinking chocolate; a devout Quaker 1, like his brothers, he sold the drink not only as a nutritious component of breakfast, but as a healthy substitute for alcohol late in the day. The business had grown steadily, the workforce had expanded, bigger premises had been acquired and then, in 1879 his sons decided to move production out of Birmingham altogether. The area they chose largely consisted, at the time, of sloping meadowland. Their vision: industry and nature existing in harmony, symbiotic, co-dependent. At first the factory was small. A one-storey red-bricked building, flooded with light on three sides by generous windows that allowed views onto the green spaces all around. Next to the factory were placed sports fields, gardens, and a children's playground. From here, the city centre seemed remote. This place called itself a village and it felt like a village. Workers had to travel from miles around, arriving at the railway station that in those days was still known as Stirchley Street. This arrangement could not continue for long, given that by the end of the nineteenth century the number of people employed at the Works had risen from two hundred to more than two and a half thousand. In 1895 the company acquired more of the land surrounding the factory buildings, and soon the workers could enjoy further recreation grounds and a cricket pitch. But the Cadbury family's ambition went beyond that. They imagined houses; affordable houses, well-built houses, houses with deep gardens where trees could flourish and vegetables could be grown. Quakerism, as before, was at the heart of their project and their goal was "the amelioration of the conditions of the working class and labouring population in and around Birmingham by the provision of improved dwellings, with gardens and opened spaces to be enjoyed therewith".

Jonathan COE, Bournville, 2022

1 Quaker: member of a Protestant religious group.

Document B

Ebenezer HOWARD, Advertisement for Welwyn Garden City, 1920

Document C

Coketown 1, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black […]. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled 2. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. […]

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there – as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple 3 over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end.

Charles DICKENS, Hard Times, 1854

1 Coketown: a fictitious town, situated in the North of England.

2 never got uncoiled: never stopped coming out of the chimneys.

3 a square steeple: a church tower.

Partie 2: Traduction, en français (4 points)

Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document A (lignes 11 à 17):

At first the factory was small. A one-storey red-bricked building, flooded with light on three sides by generous windows that allowed views onto the green spaces all around. Next to the factory were placed sports fields, gardens, and a children’s playground. From here, the city centre seemed remote. This place called itself a village and it felt like a village. Workers had to travel from miles around, arriving at the railway station that in those days was still known as Stirchley Street.