Eindexamen engels vmbo gl/tl 2012, tijdvak 1

Skipping your Way to Fitness The playground sport is right back in fashion, reports Nicholas Roe 1 A rope screams through the air at 200 revs a minute, energy is burned at the jaw-sagging rate of 1,300 calories an hour and miracles of physical activity are performed in front of cheering crowds. Welcome to the new, super cool world of … skipping. Once considered childish, this ancient playtime skill 3 . And what’s emerging is not just an effective route to mass fitness for little outlay (£5 decent rope), but a new place for young athletes in a growing international sport that’s intriguing to watch. 2 Fiercely competitive, hugely physically demanding, skipping as rope-jumping – also shows signs quite literally, the new rock ’n roll. James Morrison recently featured a team of competition skippers in his music video You Give Me Something . 4 , Britain’s best skippers returned from the World Rope Jumping Championships in Canada this summer with a creditable fourth place. 3 Four years ago the British Rope Skipping Association (BRSA) started trying to raise the profile of the sport, persuading television shows such as Blue Peter to focus on the subtle complexity of rope work, which can involve 200 different kinds of ‘jump’. Directors loved the fancy footwork and youthful profile. Huge efforts were also being ploughed into getting skipping back into the playground. This year saw Britain establishing a new world record when 7,632 children skipped continuously for three minutes in 85 locations, backed by teachers who consider rope-work to be a great way to improve youth fitness. 4 “Skipping went out of fashion because video games and PlayStations came along,” says Sue Dalem, secretary of the BRSA. “But teachers are now pushing to bring it back.” Dalem says that young people are instantly amazed at what is possible with just a simple rope. Her own daughters, Beci, 18, and Rachael, 17, started as seven-year-olds and now skip for Britain: “We skip four or five times a week for two or three hours at a time,” says Rachael. “It’s fun.” 5 And this is the key. 6 basic skipping is simple, and almost anyone with five square feet of free space can do it, there’s a genuinely attractive art to higher-level work. Half a dozen clubs in Britain regularly compete. 6 In speed contests, the world record is 188 jumps in 30 seconds. More creatively, rope-jumpers use one or even two long ropes held by team members to perform cartwheels, push-ups, handstands and aerial leaps while avoiding a rope spinning at 200 rpm. Skipping for 10 minutes is said to be the equivalent of

30 minutes’ jogging, and it tones the upper body as well as the legs. The truly extraordinary thing, perhaps, is that this antique pastime ever lost its mass appeal in the first place. 7 Although the trend has been reversed, one remaining challenge is that many young men still consider skipping an off-puttingly girly activity. This is surprising, given that boxers rely on skipping for endurance training. And when was Mike Tyson ever a sissy?

Big Kids on the Block Johnny Dee 1 Last Saturday, an account manager from south-east London spent seven hours sitting in her Vauxhall Zafira parked outside the house of a stranger she knew only as the Giraffe. “It was,” she says, “one of the most exciting things I've ever done.” The woman, who would like to be known as Agent Squirtel, in order to protect her identity from rogue commandos, was taking part in StreetWars Killer, a water-pistol assassin game that has turned 150 Londoners into paranoid snipers with super-soakers. At about 8am her target emerged from his house and she gave chase down the street, successfully aiming her gun at his upper torso. It was only then that she realised she had squirted the wrong man: it was the Giraffe's flatmate, Dave. “He was OK about it,” she says. “It was a hot day, he said he would dry out.” 2 StreetWars is just one of many large-scale urban games being played in cities all across the world. All of them are similar in that information spreads via the internet. To anyone who chances upon them on the street, they seem like surreal, random events. All of them also utilise wireless technology such as GPRS 1) , use real streets rather than boards or computer screens as their game's grid, and all resemble childhood games in their simplicity. noot 1 GPRS = General Packet Radio Service, used by GSM mobile phones noot 2 Peter Pan complex = when you suffer from this, you don’t want to grow up

My Son, the Chimp British teacher takes him toys, watches TV and has a By Marie Woolf Political Editor 1 A British woman has launched a court challenge to become the legal guardian of a 160lb chimpanzee in a test case that could confer basic rights on apes across Europe. 2 Paula Stibbe, 38, a teacher who lives in Vienna, has applied to the Austrian courts to take legal responsibility for a 26-year-old male chimpanzee which, she fears, could be subjected to laboratory tests if he isn’t given legal ‘rights’. Animal- welfare organisations see it as a test case that would watching TV give special legal status to the great apes. It comes as Members of Parliament make a fresh attempt to ban animal testing on primates 1) across Europe. 3 Ms Stibbe, who is originally from Brighton, befriended Hiasl the chimp eight years ago and now visits him every week, bringing biscuits and his favourite Viennese pastries, clothes, including Wellington boots, and art materials. The ape, which has lived in an Austrian animal sanctuary 2) most of his life after being rescued by customs officials as a baby, is facing an uncertain future after the sanctuary ran out of cash. 4 Ms Stibbe, who spends hours with Hiasl each week, says she regards him as a ‘friend’ and is horrified about the prospect of him being transported to a laboratory. If her application to become his legal guardian is successful, she would be responsible for making decisions about his welfare. 5 She told The Independent on Sunday she plays hide and seek and watches wildlife programmes with him. “He likes being tickled and he likes dressing-up clothes,” she said. “He is especially fond of Wellington boots…. He likes drawing with coloured chalk, mostly scribbling. He laughs a lot and is very gentle with me, even though he has the strength of seven men. He has a special greeting for me and tweaks my nose between his middle and index finger when I arrive. He enjoys watching TV, and is specially fond of wildlife documentaries. I showed

him a video of gorillas, and when two gorillas were mating he was completely fascinated by them. I want to make sure that he has a fully secure future, and does not end up in a lab abroad.” 6 Hiasl was captured as a one-year-old in Sierra Leone and smuggled to Austria, where he was bound for a vivisection lab. He was found by customs officers after surviving the journey to Europe in a box, and was taken in by the sanctuary. 7 20 he is granted basic legal rights, he could be sent abroad to a laboratory when the sanctuary closes. Paula Stibbe’s case follows moves in New Zealand and Spain to give rights to great apes. These apes share about 98 per cent of their DNA with humans. noot 1 primate = (mens)aap n oot 2 animal sanctuary = dierenopvang

Can she fix it? Yes she can! As Julie Bindel discovers, female builders are in huge demand – but can they ever compete with the tea-slurping boys? 1 Of all the construction workers employed at London’s Wembley Stadium, what percentage would you guess are women? Five? Ten? Twenty at a push? How about 0.05%? “Out of 10,000,” notes Karen Procter, director of the national organisation, Women and Manual Trades (WAMT), “between three and five are women.” 2 It’s a statistic that seems even more shocking when you consider that, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics in London, Britain is short of 350,000 builders. Across the building trade, women account for fewer than 1% of workers, making the building site still very much a man’s domain – what Procter describes as ‘the last bastion of sexist discrimination in the workplace’. 3 The government belatedly seems to have taken notice. Education Secretary Alan Johnson recently reserved £20m for training women in construction. Whether this will be enough remains to be seen. 4 Amid all this bad news, though, there are a few success stories. Plasterer Janet Shelley says that she has always wanted to “do things that people think are impossible”, and so set up Women Builders, a company that now employs the UK’s largest female construction workforce – 14 full-time builders. “We have no problems filling vacancies,” says Shelley. “There are lots more women wanting to work in the trade than there are jobs.” 5 So I set off for Milton Keynes, where Women Builders set up three years ago. Women Builders are renovating a local village school, ripping out kitchens and rebuilding walls. I meet Louise Horwood, a 20-year-old carpenter. “I always wanted to be a builder,” she tells me, “but my dad, who is in the trade, was dead against it.” After leaving school, Horwood briefly tried hairdressing college, but hated it. “I had never been so bored in all my life,” she says, “and my dad’s pressure on me only made me more determined.” She entered the world of construction aged just 16 and at first struggled to cope. “Men would harassingly say, ‘Don’t break your nails on that, love, it’s too heavy.’ But I kept going and now I’m one of them.” 6 Janet Shelley works closely with WAMT – which represents and supports women working and training in skilled manual and craft occupations – to try to establish better working practices and reduce discrimination. When WAMT

began in 1975, small numbers of middle-class, white, educated women entered the trade partly to protest at women’s exclusion. Today, however, 60% of members are black, and have similar class backgrounds to their male counterparts. “Most of these women are moving out of manual jobs like cleaning and catering into trades where they can earn four times as much,” says Procter. 7 Women Builders is never short of work, but there is still the occasional customer who does not understand the kind of firm they are. “Sometimes you turn up for a job at someone’s house, or business, and the highly surprised client will say to us, ‘Oh, you really are women!’” 8 Shelley and Horwood say that when they are on a building site, people will stop and openly stare at them. Some will shout and ask what they are doing. “We are at the stage with women construction workers today that we were 25 years ago with male nurses,” Procter believes. “In a few years, it will be far more common to see women in hard hats up on scaffolding.” 9 If women in building are to really flourish, organisations such as WAMT say, it is crucial that the opportunity offered by the 2012 Olympics isn’t wasted. “We will see how keen the government is to end the extreme levels of sexism and discrimination in the building trade,” says Procter, “and we expect to see many more women encouraged and trained to work on building sites, alongside men who treat them as equals.” A tall order, maybe, but these women certainly know how to stand up to the big boys.