Opción A - 4 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Extraordinaria (Fase Mejora de Nota) 2024

OPTION A

THE BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION OF LIFE ON MARS —ON EARTH

In May 1996, an autonomous vehicle joined with Russia’s Mir space station. It carried the usual

items — food, clothes, scientific equipment — along with much more cherished ones. The American

astronaut Shannon Lucid received M&Ms. For the two cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev and Yuri Onufriyenko,

there were perfume-scented letters offering a break from the smells of the space station, which astronauts

5 have associated with body odor, trash and hot metal.

Space crews in the past have delighted in the scents of fresh tomatoes, lemons and apples. Its

psychological value is considered high enough to justify the extreme expense of delivery. (A single apple

costs around $300 to launch to orbit today aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.)

Many experts suggest that Mars settlers will need to live inside heavily engineered habitats,

10 protected from a world with high radiation, a thin atmosphere and toxic dust storm. Communication with

Earth will require at least three minutes each way, making live calls from home impossible even during

emergencies. There are nevertheless those who would try to make a new home on Mars, though even the

most ambitious proposals don’t put humans there until 2029 at the earliest. In the meantime, the Mars

Society offers a chance to rehearse extraterrestrial living in some of the most Mars-like locations on Earth.

15 At the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, crews of up to seven work and sleep in a small

cylindrical habitat connected to a dome, a greenhouse and an observatory by narrow enclosed pathways so

that participants can move between facilities without breaking the simulation.

MDRS is by no means a perfect analog for life on Mars. Crew members’ suits aren’t really

pressurized. The gravity is earthlike, and missions last for weeks instead of years. Problems can be solved

20 by a car ride to the hardware store. As space launch deadlines are perpetually postponed by NASA and

SpaceX alike, crews at MDRS continue to take care of this bit of Mars on Earth, carrying a dream and

keeping it tangible along with fellow believers. (Fragment adapted from The New York Times.)

4) VOCABULARY (2 POINTS).

4.1

Choose one of the options below and find one word in the text for its definition (0.6 POINTS):

4.2

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4.3

For one of the following words from the text, give a synonym that fits the meaning of the text (0.8 POINTS):