ABITURPRÜFUNG 1998 Arbeitszeit: 180 Minuten
ENGLISCH
als Grundkursfach
Textaufgabe I
COKE AND BIG MACS AREN'T THE REAL THING
When German prisoners of war arrived in New Jersey during the
second world war, they broke into excited chatter on seeing a Coca-
Cola advertisement. "We are surprised you have Coca-Cola here, too,"
They told their guards. The story told by Mark Prendergast in this
5 history of the company suggests that the theory that global food
habits promote global peace rests on slender foundations.
Yet the growth of branded food habits1 is such a feature of our
times that it demands investigation. It is not a new development
to connect Coca-Cola or Kellogg's Cornflakes with harmony both of
10 the inner man and of the whole human race. Such products, appear-
ing in many industrialised countries at about the same time a
century ago, were promoted as tonics2 and magical substances, not
simple victuals. Their makers often implied that dietary3 revolu-
tion was part of a more general revolution that could lead to the
15 most positive developments. When Coca-Cola gathered 200 young
people on a hillside and had them sing "I'd like to teach the
world to sing in perfect harmony", it was only continuing an
already established tradition.
The American fast-food chains that emerged in a big way in the
20 early 1950s operated on a different basis from the pseudo-medical
foundation of Coca-Cola and Kellogg. This other principle was the
democratisation of meat. In societies which, in memory if not in
present fact, had never had enough meat, the daily availability,
at a low price, of hot beef and chicken was a historic achievement.
25 With every hamburger the ordinary man enjoyed not just a meat
patty4, but a taste of the privilege that in a half-remembered
past had been confined to the upper class. In America, which had
admittedly always been a meat-eating country, new farming tech-
niques allowed a breakthrough to hitherto impossible levels of
30 cheapness.
With cheapness came speed. A Burger King founder noted: "There
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are only two things our customers have, time and money, and they
don't like spending either."
But the customers were not only eating and drinking health and
35 privilege. They were, and are, eating and drinking America.
Outside America, what was being consumed was a symbol of the power
and affluence of the US. McDonald's local partner in Japan
suggested hamburgers would in time transform Japanese from short
and yellow to tall and white.
40 In eastern Europe the Mc Donald's hamburger performs a different
function from the one it performs in America. In the latter, it
is, if not the food of the poor, a food the poor can afford. In
Russia, it is the food of the rich, to the extent that McDonald's
has few outlets outside Moscow because there are still too few
45 capitalists to eat theproduct.
In the United States, the America being consumed is the
supposedly simpler and better America of the past. Or it is a more
orderly America. As one customer of a Harlem McDonald's told a
Wall Street Journal writer: "Ain't no hip-hop5 here, ain't no
50 profanity6. The picture, the plants, the way people keep things
neat here, it makes you feel like you're in civilisation."
Civilisation! Yet it is not such a joke. The fast-food chains
do represent a kind of order. They utilise the attractions of
replication and common ritual, the comfort of places where staff
55 and customers know their roles, where there is no uncertainty, few
choices, everything is familiar and known.
Whether the word-wide penetration7 of American food products
represents, as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times suggested in
his recent half-serious but catchy8 thesis, an opening up by
60 countries to the international economy, tying them together in a
way that makes it unlikely they will make war on one another is
to be doubted. McDonald's is just a detail in such tendencies, not
a cause or even a symptom of change.
Equally doubtful is his suggestion that McDonald's has achieved
65 Some balance between global and local forces. These chains could
not exist without the linkages between food and local production,
between food and skilled cooking, and between food and health,
having been weakened - developments for which they are not respon-
sible but which have many unhappy consequences.
From: The Guardian, xxx Datum xxx
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ENGLISCH als GRUNDKURSFACH - Textaufgabe I
WORKSHEET: Coke and Big Macs Aren't the Real Thing
maximum number of
points attainable
I. Questions on the text
Read all the questions first, then answer them
in the given order.
Use your own words as far as is appropriate.
1. Outline the advertising strategies used by
Coca-Cola and Kellog's 10
2. Summarise the reasons for the success of
fast-food chains both inside and outside
the United States. (Refer to lines 19-45.) 30
3. What does the example of the Harlem McDonald's
reveal about the function of fast-food
restaurants in present-day America?
Refer to the customer's statement and the
writer's comment. 10
4. Analyse the writer's attitude towards American
fast-food chains as it becomes evident in his
evaluation of Thomas Friedman's thesis. 20
5. What is the function of the first paragraph?
Refer to the writer's argument, too. 10
II. Composition 40
Choose o n e of the following topics.
Write about 120 to 150 words.
1. American influence on European culture -
enrichment or danger?
2. Could you imagine being a vegetarian?
III. Translation 40
Translate the following text into German:
_____
160
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What Americans could most profitably learn from the French
has nothing to do with recipes; it doesn't even have anything to
do with cooking. It's about eating. "We have such an uptight1
attitude about it. We think it's sin," says Patricia Wells, the
American food writer long resident in France. She's right: surely
America is the only country where people are cajoled into buying
food products because they're "sinfully delicious". Food isn't
a sin and it isn't an indulgence. It's one of life's natural
pleasures, but most Americans have never found it easy to eat
companionably2 in that spirit. For anyone lucky enough to visit
a restaurant in Paris, look around you. The animated faces, the
buzz of conversation, the clusters of friends lingering for
hours, the sense they convey of being perfectly comfortable - no
American restaurant, even one with terrific food, evokes
precisely that feeling of pleasure at the table.
From: Newsweek, 16 December 1991
1 uptight: here: inhibited
2 companionable: friendly, sociable
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