Ejercicio Grupo A - Pregunta 6 · Inglés PAU Canarias Junio (Humanidades) 2023

Tennessee high school students build robotic hand for new classmate

Starting at a new school this year, 15-year-old Sergio Peralta had all the typical teenage reasons to be

nervous. He was also trying to keep a secret: a hand that was not fully formed. “In the first days of school, I

honestly felt like hiding my hand,” he told CBS Radio News. “Although it was unrealistic to think that nobody

would ever find out.”

5 “As I was growing up, during my first years of school, a lot of people asked me what was wrong with my

hand, and even in kindergarten I used to say, ‘I was born like that.’ I learnt to write with my left hand and I

could cope with nearly everything else,” the 15-year-old Sergio recalled in his interview with the local radio

station. But an engineering teacher at Hendersonville High School, Jeff Wilkins, learnt his secret and assigned

his students a project: to build Sergio a new hand.

10 Those classmates then spent four weeks designing, 3D-printing and sizing a prosthetic hand for Sergio. To

make the hand, they used a common plastic material that is also utilized in electronic devices. They then

applied an elastic thermoplastic, commonly found in phone and laptop cases, so that the fingers could flex

and squeeze objects. They added fishing line and Velcro so Peralta could easily attach the hand to his forearm.

One of the first things for which Sergio used his new prosthetic was to catch a ball with his right hand. “I was

15 just so excited,” he said.

Hendersonville student, 17-year-old Leslie Jaramillo, told local radio that the project embodied the spirit of

their school’s engineering class. “You’re supposed to be engineering, coming up with new ideas, solving

issues, and just making things better than they used to be,” Jaramillo said. “This project showed me a different

way to help the community.”

20 Their head teacher, Bob Cotter, echoed Leslie’s sentiment in an interview with the BBC. He said Wilkins and

his students challenge themselves to turn abstract concepts “into reality”. And, Cotter added, Sergio’s robotic

hand “is a testament to the students here who care about each other and the program that Jeff Wilkins has

built.”

Sergio told CBS News that he would never have expected his classmates’ kindness and creativity “in a million

25 years”. “I didn’t know them, so I was actually introduced to them by the teacher,” Peralta said of his classmates

who helped him with his prosthetic. “And then I started working on it too, and I got to be friends with them.

I had been living without a hand for 15 years and now they’ve offered me two! It’s actually pretty cool. No

one has ever offered me this stuff – it’s changed my life.”

Fragment adapted from The Guardian, January 2023

6. WRITE a composition of about 120-150 words on the following topic (3 points):

Write an e-mail to Sergio's teacher inviting him and Sergio to your school's Technology Week to talk about the project and their experience.

Word count: words (target: 120-150 words)