IB English A Lang & Lit Magazine Article Questionbank

The following extract is from TIME magazine's Asia Edition, featuring a news feature on young South Korean workers who are choosing to limit their working hours and decline promotions.

¹ OECD: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organisation of 38 countries that produces comparative data on economic and social policies; its
annual publication on working hours is widely used in labour policy debates.

² karoshi: a Japanese and Korean term meaning "death from overwork"; it refers to fatal medical events, including heart attacks, strokes, and suicide, directly attributable to excessive
working hours and occupational stress; the phenomenon has been recognised as a compensable cause of death in both Japan and South Korea since the 1980s.

The following extract is from New Scientist magazine, a popular science publication, featuring an article on mycorrhizal fungal networks and the scientific debate over how to describe plant communication.

¹ mycorrhizal fungi: fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant roots, extending the plant's ability to absorb water and nutrients in exchange for carbon-rich sugars produced by the
plant through photosynthesis; the word comes from the Greek for "fungus root", and mycorrhizal associations are found in almost all terrestrial plant ecosystems.

² mother tree: a term coined by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard to describe large, centrally connected trees in a forest that are disproportionately linked to the fungal network; research
suggests they play a significant role in supporting younger trees and seedlings through carbon transfer.

The following extract is from Breathe magazine, a UK wellbeing and mindfulness publication, featuring a profile of a Japanese ceramicist living and working in rural Devon, England.

¹ UX (user experience) design: the practice of designing digital products, such as websites and applications, to be intuitive and satisfying for users; it involves research into user
behaviour, interface design, and the management of how people move through digital environments.

² wabi-sabi: a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical concept that finds beauty in imperfection, transience, and incompleteness; in craft traditions, it informs an appreciation for handmade
objects that bear visible marks of the making process and the passage of time.

The following extract is from National Geographic magazine, featuring a long-form reportage piece on the Guna people of Panama's San Blas Archipelago and the threat posed by rising sea levels to their
ancestral islands.

¹ San Blas Archipelago: a chain of approximately 365 small coral islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama; home to the Guna people for centuries and protected as an autonomous territory
(Guna Yala) under Panamanian law since 1938.

² Guna: an indigenous people of Panama and Colombia who have maintained autonomous governance of the San Blas Archipelago; they number approximately 80,000, of whom around 40,000 live on the islands, with the remainder in urban areas and the Colombian border region.

³ 1925 Guna Revolution: a successful uprising by the Guna people against Panamanian assimilation policies that had banned traditional clothing, language, and customs; the revolution resulted in a peace treaty granting the Guna significant autonomy over their territory, recognised in the Panamanian constitution of 1938.