Opción B - 4 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Ordinaria 2024

OPTION B

DOES DNA HOME TESTING REALLY UNDERSTAND RACE?

Last year, I did what 12 million people from all over the world have done and surrendered my spit

to a home DNA-testing company. I hoped a MyHeritage test would bring me the peace I needed; my Irish

mother had never been able to give me any information about my biological father. Raised by her and my

white dad, I’d always longed for help answering the “Where are you from?” question. I’d spent years

5 making up exotic-sounding combinations to justify my appearance.

The results arrived by email on a summer’s day last year. I clicked on the “ethnicity estimate” link,

which offers an analysis of DNA by country. The test showed that my blackness comes from Nigeria; 43%

of my DNA, in fact. Then there’s 1% from Kenya, and the rest from Great Britain and Ireland (55%), as

well as eastern Europe (1%). I’d often been told I looked east African, or mixed with multiple countries, so

10 I was surprised by what was nearly a 50/50 split. I had no cultural knowledge of Nigeria. Did the results

mean my very distant ancestors were Nigerian, or that my biological father was probably from there? I felt

more confused than ever.

This wasn’t quite what the adverts had promised. Marketing for home-testing kits shows smiling

models under the banner “find out your ethnicity”, or urges people to book holidays based on their “DNA

15 story”. While DNA home tests are more popular than ever, people are starting to raise questions about what

happens after having the results. Concerns about the storage of sensitive genetic information were

highlighted recently, when an open-source DNA testing site, GEDmatch, was used by the police to identify

California’s Golden State Killer. As well as privacy concerns, there are the emotional consequences of

receiving confusing or life-changing results. Identities that have been cherished by families for generations

20 can be dismantled overnight. Ancestry is a legacy, not a bloodline. Our genetic script may be one of the

most valuable things we own, but it’s never the whole story. (Fragment adapted from The Guardian.)

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

Find a synonym in the text for one of the two words below (0.6 POINTS):

4.3

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