Comentario Problema Agrario

PAU Practice Examination (Islas Canarias)



|5 | |
|10|The Joke’s on You |
|15 |If you have ever been fooled by a practical joke or ahoax, your first feeling was probably |
|20 |anger – at yourself for being misled and at others for misleading you. But don’t feel bad. Hoaxes have beenaround for a long |
| |time, and very clever and educated people have been deceived. |
| |The word “hoax” derives from“hocus”, part of the Latin phrase “hocus-pocus”, meaning “something that fools your eyes”. It was |
| |first used around 1800, but pranks and hoaxes have existed at least since the time ofthe ancient Greeks. The god Hermes was |
| |supposedly “full of tricks”, and his first prank was directed against his brother, the god Apollo. By the Middle Ages, court |
||jesters were actually expected to play tricks on the king and courtiers to amuse them. |
| |However, most hoaxes are perpetrated on unknowing subjects,many of them educated and rational. For example, Sir Arthur Conan |
| |Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a physician, yet he was tricked into believing in the existence of fairiesafter being |
| |shown photographs of them. Decades later, the girls who had taken the pictures, who were by then old women, admitted that the |
| |“fairies” were paper cut-outs.|
| |In 1971, many anthropologists were led to believe that a peaceful Stone Age tribe, the...