Unseen לבגרות באנגלית אסטרטגיות וקטעים

1 Twenty years ago, most people bought new clothes a few times a year. Today, many of us buy something new almost every week, often without really needing it. A T-shirt can cost less than a sandwich, and online shops offer thousands of new items every day. This is what is known as fast fashion: cheap clothes that are designed quickly, produced quickly and thrown away almost as quickly. It seems like a good deal for consumers, but the real price is paid by someone else.

2 The first cost is to the environment. Making a single pair of jeans can use thousands of litres of water, much of it to grow cotton in dry regions. The dyes used to colour cheap fabrics are often poured straight into local rivers, turning the water blue, red or black. Many cheap fabrics are made from plastic fibres, and every time they are washed, tiny pieces end up in rivers and oceans. Worst of all, most of these clothes are worn only a handful of times before they are thrown away. In some countries, mountains of unwanted clothing now cover beaches and fields, because there is simply nowhere else to put them.

3 The second cost is a human one. To keep prices low, many brands produce their clothes in factories where workers earn very little and work very long hours. In two thousand and thirteen, a factory building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than one thousand workers who had been ordered to return to work despite cracks in the walls. The tragedy shocked the world and led to new safety agreements. Many of the workers were young women, some of them hardly older than the students who might one day wear the clothes they made. Yet a worker who sews our clothes may still earn in a month what a shopper spends in a single afternoon.

4 Supporters of fast fashion argue that it has made style affordable for everyone, not only for the rich. They also point out that factory jobs, however hard, have helped millions of families escape poverty. These are serious arguments, and it would be unfair to ignore them. However, they do not explain why we need so many clothes, or why a company cannot pay fair wages and still make a profit.

5 Fortunately, there are signs of change. Second-hand shops and clothing-swap events are becoming popular among young people, and some brands now offer to repair the clothes they sell. As one designer put it, "The most sustainable shirt is the one already in your wardrobe." Even small choices matter: buying one good jacket instead of three cheap ones saves money over time and creates far less waste. None of us can fix the problem alone, but each of us can ask a simple question before we buy: do I really need this, and who paid the price for it?

1 For most of my life, I was afraid of silence. At home there was always a television on, and on the bus I always had music in my ears. If a conversation stopped for more than a few seconds, I rushed to fill the gap with a joke or a question. I even fell asleep with a podcast playing, because a quiet room made my thoughts feel too loud. Silence felt awkward, like a mistake that someone had to correct.

2 That changed during a summer I spent working at a nature reserve in the north. There was no phone signal for most of the day, and my job was to count birds at sunrise. For the first week I was restless and bored, and I kept reaching for a phone that could not connect to anything. Then, slowly, something shifted. I began to notice sounds I had never heard before: the different calls of birds, the wind moving through dry grass, even my own breathing. I realised that silence was not empty at all; it was full of things I had been too busy to hear.

3 Back in the city, I started to experiment with small moments of quiet. I walked to school without headphones once a week. At first it felt strange, but I soon began to recognise the sounds of my own street: a dog behind a fence, a shop opening in the morning, children laughing in a yard. When a friend told me about a problem, I tried not to answer immediately, and to my surprise, she often went on to say what was really bothering her. A teacher once told me that the best listeners are not the people who talk wisely, but the people who are comfortable with a pause. I did not understand her then; I think I do now.

4 Scientists, it seems, have reached similar conclusions. Some studies suggest that short periods of quiet can lower stress and help the brain process what it has learned. In one experiment, people who sat in silence for two minutes between pieces of music felt calmer than when they listened to relaxing music the whole time. I am not a scientist, and I cannot judge such research, but it matches my own experience.

5 Of course, not all silence is good. The silence of someone who is ignored, or of a person who is afraid to speak up, is painful, and nobody should have to accept it. The silence I mean is a different kind: a choice, not a punishment. It is the quiet that we create on purpose, in order to think, to listen and to notice. I still enjoy music, and I still talk too much at times. But I have stopped being afraid of the pause in a conversation, because I have learned that something important often arrives just after it.