Ejercicio 2.1 · Inglés PAU Aragón Extraordinaria 2026

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LEARNING LANGUAGES TWO MINUTES EACH DAY

Duolingo is the most frequently downloaded education app in the world. It was founded by the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, known for creating the test CAPTCHA, designed to tell computers and humans apart. In 2009, shortly after developing the system called reCAPTCHA, von Ahn sold it to Google for a sum that would ensure neither he nor his future children would ever need to work.

Instead of retiring, he set up a new project, Duolingo, whose popularity spiked dramatically in March 2020, when COVID-19 shut hundreds of millions of people in their homes. But attracting people is one thing, and getting them to stay is another—this is Duolingo’s core business. When you begin a course on the app, you are greeted by the company’s mascot, a green owl named Duo. Then, cartoon characters speak sentences to you and prompt you to translate them. Users are reminded to finish at least one lesson each day. They earn points and trophies, and move through increasingly challenging levels.

In order to engage learners’ brains in different ways, Duolingo deliberately limits the kind of explicit grammar instruction we might associate with an old-fashioned foreign-language class. It pushes learners to use the building blocks of a language, and to understand, through that experience, how they fit together. The lessons do not exceed, on average, two minutes, although that length has been decreasing. “Already we’re a little worried that younger generations actually expect thirty-second activities, not a two-minute thing”, von Ahn said.

Another key element is the number of user repetitions, which generates an enormous amount of data. While the app teaches users, users are simultaneously teaching the app to be a better instructor. Duolingo is now using GPT-4, a large language model created by the artificial-intelligence company OpenAI. It has been trained on far more data than previous models.

Von Ahn believes that artificial intelligence would eventually make computers better teachers than people. He considers this a hopeful development, since more people have access to smartphones than to high-quality education. “I really want people to be able to learn for free”, he said.

Surprisingly, a recent study reveals that most teachers do not oppose Duolingo. Instead, they see it as supplemental to the kind of deep immersion that language learning requires. Despite von Ahn’s predictions, they find it highly unlikely that apps will replace human instructors in the upcoming future.

(Adapted from “How much can Duolingo teach us?”, The New Yorker)

PART 2. Use of English (2.1 points)

2.1. (1 point). Find words or phrases in the text which mean the same as the ones below.

0.25 points will be awarded for each answer, with four answers in total. This exercise aims to assess the comprehension of the text and the semantic value of certain terms that appear in it. Therefore, the answer can never be, for example, a hypernym, or have a different grammatical form.

2.1.1.

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2.1.4.