Texto Selectividad Extremadura 2006 Septiembre

Violence in Media Entertainment

Between the years 2000 B.C. and 44 A.D., the ancient Egyptians entertained themselves with plays repeating the murder of their god Osiris –and the spectacle, history tells us, led to a number of copycat killings. The ancient Romans were given to lethal spectator sports as well, and in 30 B.C. Saint Augustine lamented that his society was addicted to gladiator games and “drunk with the fascination of bloodshed”.

Violence has always played a role in entertainment. But there’s a growing consensus that, in recent years, something about media violence has changed. In the first place, there’s more violence than ever before. Laval University professors Guy Paquette and Jacques de Guise studied six major Canadian television networks over a seven-year period, examining films, situation comedies, dramatic series, and children’s programming (though not cartoons). The study found that between 1993 and 2001, incidents of physical violence increased by 378 per cent. TV shows in 2001average 40 acts of violence per hour.

Moreover, other research indicates that media violence has not just increased in quantity, it has also become much more graphic, much more sexual, and much more sadistic. Explicit pictures of slow-motion bullets exploding from people’s chests, and dead bodies surrounded by pools of blood, are now commonplace material. One of the top-selling video games in the world, Grand Theft Auto, is programmed so players can beat people to death with baseballs bats.

Concerns about media violence have grown as television and movies have acquired a global audience. When UNESCO surveyed children in 23 countries around the world in 1998, it discovered that 91 per cent of children had a television in their home –and not just in the US, Canada And Europe, but also in the Arab States, Latin America, Asia And Africa. More than a half of boys living in war zones and high-crime areas chose action heroes as role models, ahead of any other images; and a remarkable 88 per cent of the children surveyed could identify the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from the film Terminator. UNESCO reported that Terminator “seems to represent the characteristics that children think are necessary to cope with difficult situations”.

1. Should all violence in films and TV programmes be prohibited? Express your opinion in around 80-100 words.
2. According to the text, what are the main changes in media violence over the last few years? (Give a short answer enumerating at least two changes).
3. Imagine a friend of yours wants to watch a violent film. Tell him or her not to do it.
4. Write the following sentence in the negative form of the simple past:
“Violence has always played arole in entertainment”.
5. Find two words in the text containing vowels or groups of vowels which are pronounced in the same way as o in slow, ea in dead, and ay in play (underline the part of the word which contains the sound).