Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42.
On my way to Poland the other week, I was going through security at Heathrow behind an elderly man who walked with an aluminium crutch. He went through the metal detector leaning on his wife, having left the crutch next to the conveyor belt. The detector beeped, so the man was given his crutch and forced to go back through to remove his shoes, a procedure that obviously caused him some annoyance and discomfort. Now in socks, he was ordered to pass through the metal detector again. But he wasn’t allowed to take his crutch with him and his wife wasn’t allowed to go back through the detector. Eventually, the security guard himself reached a hand through the detector to help him, and the man, grimacing, limped through, while his crutch passed through the baggage scanner.
This book about absurd rules considers such ‘security’ restrictions as well as more general ‘health and safety’ rules. While ‘security’ promises to protect us from external threat, ‘safety’ protects us from accident or ourselves. Actually, the phrase ‘health and safety’ has become so familiar that we don’t quite notice that the two concepts are not necessarily mutually reinforcing. What is healthy might be unsafe (going jogging along a river populated by irritable hippos) and what is safe might be unhealthy (staying indoors binge-watching Netflix series 24 hours a day).
Although many stories of absurd official regulations turn out to be simply rules imposed by unimaginative bosses or supervisors, some do seem to be true. In Kent recently, schoolteachers had to fill out a 30-page questionnaire before taking pupils to the beach – the safety-assessment form for workers on an oil rig is only one page! In general, whenever officials cite ‘terrorism laws’ to stop you taking photographs in public places, or a call centre worker cites ‘data protection’ as a reason not to tell you something, the authors recommend being polite, but firm. ‘Really? Which rule are you thinking of? And how does it apply here?’
‘The core philosophy of the book,’ the authors say, ‘is to ask for evidence.’ It turns out that there is no evidence that, say, using your mobile phone at a petrol station is dangerous. Nor has there ever been any evidence that using your mobile phone, or any other electronic equipment, will interfere with the systems on commercial aircraft. So that rule is, finally, being relaxed.
If we were really interested in ‘evidence-based safety’, the authors argue, we would ban large trucks from city centres (they kill a lot of cyclists), as well as raising the driving age from 17 to 21. But some options, unfortunately, are simply political impossibilities. ‘In America, this is why people can’t buy unpasteurized cheese, but can buy a gun. In Britain, it is why people worry about dangerous dogs, but do little to reduce or calm the traffic around schools and playgrounds.’
(Adapted from New English File Advanced by Christina Latham-Koenig, Clive Oxeden and Jerry Lambert)
