Example

Read the following text and observe the use of passive verbs, hedges, maximisers/minimisers and other emphatic expressions/vocabulary.

• passive verbs
• hedges
• maximisers/minimisers
• other emphatic expressions/vocabulary

When research was released last week showing the level of body image distress among young people, its focal point was social media: what was driving 75% of 12-year-olds to “dislike their bodies” and feel “embarrassed by the way they look”? Why was this rising to an astounding 80% of young people by the time they reached 18? Is Instagram wrecking mental health, or is it TikTok?

Others argued that social media may be the gravity, but something more immediate had caused the crash. The rise in acute psychological distress – far higher in girls than boys – is observed in a study comparing 2021 with 2007: suicidal ideation among one in 10 girls aged 16, self-harm at almost a quarter. Lockdowns and long Covid were hypothetical factors. Among young non-binary people, the rates are even worse: 61% had self-harmed and 35% had attempted suicide. This may have its more proximal cause in the relentless campaign against them in right-wing politics and some parts of the media.

We could say with relative confidence that social media and more general turmoil are acting as accelerants, and also that going from childhood to adulthood has never been easy. But we won’t get to the root of the particular body disgust that girls experience until we admit the conditions they’re swimming in. They were not invented by Mark Zuckerberg, and blaming a timeless patriarchy is too general.

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/08/young-people-bodies-capitalism-fat-cellulite)

Task

Read the following text and observe the use of passive verbs, hedges, maximisers/minimisers and other emphatic expressions/vocabulary.

• passive verbs
• hedges
• maximisers/minimisers
• other emphatic expressions/vocabulary

Bearing down

“The Revenant” comes so close to being an action classic. Why does it fail?

WHEN one online reviewer misinterpreted a key sequence in “The Revenant”, Alejandro Iñárritu’s harrowing wilderness-survival drama acquired a nickname: “The Bear Rape Movie”. It is important to clarify, then, that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, a shaggy-bearded 19th-century frontiersman called Hugh Glass, is not raped by a bear, although ursine sexual assault is just about the only ordeal he is spared.

At the start of the film, Mr Iñárritu’s first since his Oscar-winning Broadway farce, “Birdman”, Glass is a member of a fur-trading party that is ambushed by Arikara natives. The ensuing forest battle has the nerve-shredding immediacy of the D-Day set piece in “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), Steven Spielberg’s second-world-war drama. Shortly afterwards, Glass is bitten, clawed, trodden on and flung around (but not raped) by a hulking grizzly, and then left for dead by a treacherous colleague (Tom Hardy). But he forces himself to trek for hundreds of miles to his associates’ fort, via frozen landscapes as hostile and beautifully strange as the surface of an alien planet.

Mr DiCaprio has said that his notoriously gruelling experiences on the set of “Titanic” nearly 20 years ago were a breeze compared with making “The Revenant” on location in Canada and Argentina. But his tribulations have paid off. Like Mr Hardy’s recent hit, “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “The Revenant” is a thunderous riposte to those blockbusters in which digitally rendered cities are flattened, but the violence never registers as anything other than what it is: the reorganising of pixels on a computer screen. Watching Mr Iñárritu’s visceral film, the viewer feels Glass’s pain. Every plunge into an icy river, every mouthful of twitching raw fish, every arrow through the throat seems excruciatingly real.

It is unfortunate, then, that the director has given in to his fatal weakness for distracting subplots and mystical hallucinations. If Mr Iñárritu had not fallen for padding out his primal revenge yarn to an unnecessary 156 minutes, the overpowering scenes of Glass struggling against the bear, his human enemies and nature itself would have made “The Revenant” into a classic of the action-movie genre.

(www.economist.com, Jan 2, 2016)