Ejercicio Text 2 - Part II.B. Phonetics · Inglés PAU Castilla-La Mancha Extraordinaria 2023

TEXT 2: Little pieces of literature in vending machines

The public plazas in Grenoble, France, might appear to be a prototypical European panorama of outdoor cafes, people walking, and picturesque historic architecture. But the city has recently installed a handful of vending machines that, rather than snacks, dispense short stories in an effort to change the way people kill time. Instead of checking Twitter or playing videogames, the city's residents may discover a new story from the publisher Short Édition.

The vending machines can be used for free and operate 24 hours a day. Simply decide how long of a story you'd like (one, three, or five minutes), press the corresponding button, grab the printout and start reading. Currently, there are 600 short stories in the dispensers, which represent the best written works on Short Édition according to its community of 141,000 subscribers and 1,100 authors.

Quentin Plepé, co-founder of Short Édition, and his team came up with the idea a couple of years ago as they were standing around a snack machine in their office. What if the same concept could be applied to literature, they wondered. After two years of development, they finally launched their design. “The city council got involved from the beginning. What they really liked was the fact that the dispensers distribute culture through the city in an original way,” Plepé says. “Stories are an important part of our life. More and more people don’t take the time anymore to sit and read a book. This is a way to have a little ‘bite’ of a story, just for a couple of minutes,” concludes Plepé.

Adapted from atlasobscura.com

PART II. LEXICON / PHONETICS (2 POINTS)

B. PHONETICS. (1 POINT) (0.25 points for each correct answer)

1. How is the "th" pronounced in "rather"? /ð/ or /θ/?

2. How is the "a" pronounced in "came"? /æ/, /eɪ/ or /ʌ/?

3. How is the "ed" pronounced in "involved"? /t/, /d/, or /ɪd/?