Ejercicio B1 · Inglés PAU Valencia Extraordinaria solapamiento 2024

TEXT B/TEXTO B

HANGING OUT WITH FRIENDS, A PASTIME WE'RE AT RISK OF LOSING

We spend more time online. We socialise less. Our mental health is getting worse. These three trends have been obvious for some time but now more evidence is linking them. This is a crisis, and we will need to solve it. What, exactly, has happened to hanging out?

Much has been written on the idea that, being glued to our phones, with some social needs thereby fulfilled, we have less time to see our friends in real life. But hanging out has not just been displaced but devalued. We think it is less important, less prestigious. Real-life socialising has dropped sharply in status. It is true, too, for the rest of us, particularly teenagers and generation Z. It has become fashionable for young people to describe themselves as introverts who suffer from social anxiety.

People film themselves alone in their bedrooms. I remember when this sort of thing would brand you as a loser. Now it's the extrovert who looks like the odd one out. This is of course, in one sense, very convenient: for introverts, the world has become a more accepting place, and the internet has created friendly spaces for people who have not always had it easy offline.

But online, social lives are rendered as data, points to accumulate. Simply spending time with friends doesn't create social "value" in the way we have learned to think of it. In an online world that values the production of content, hanging out with friends is a profoundly unproductive thing to do.

Adapted from an article by Martha Gill, The Observer, 18-2-2024.

B1. Answer the following questions using your own words but taking into account the information in the text. (2 points: 1 point each)

a)

Why do we spend less time with friends offline?

b)

Why is not hanging out beneficial to introverts?