Skyrocket your IELTS speaking band score by 1-2 points in under a month with real-time AI conversations!
Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (1)
Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (1)
0 / 35
Total Correct Answers:
0
/ 35
(1)
Salman Rushdie Life under threat A hot air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm carrying several passengers.
(2)
A leak develops.
(3)
The balloon starts losing height.
(4)
The pit.
(5)
A dark yawn comes closer.
(6)
Good grief, The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety.
(7)
The many must be sacrificed to save the One.
(8)
But who should live?
(9)
Who should die?
(10)
And who could make such a choice?
(11)
In point of fact, debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms.
(12)
For of course what I've described is the given situation of that Evergreen favorite, the balloon debate, in which has the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits of the well known figures they have placed in disasters mouth.
(13)
The assembled company blithely accepts the faintly unpleasant idea that a human being's right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices, that we may be born equal, but thereafter our lives weighed differently in the scales.
(14)
It's only make believe, after all, and while it may not be very nice, it does reflect how people actually think.
(15)
I have now spent over 1000 days in just such a balloon.
(16)
But alas, this isn't a game.
(17)
For most of these thousand days, my fellow travelers included the Western hostages in Lebanon and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq, Roger Cooper and Ian Richter.
(18)
And I had to accept, and did accept, that for most of my countrymen and countrywomen, my plight counted for less than the others.
(19)
In any choice between us, I'd have been the first to be pitched out of the basket and into the abyss.
(20)
Our lives teach us who we are, I wrote at the end of my essay in Food Faith.
(21)
Some of the lessons have been harsh and difficult to learn.
(22)
Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to redescribe it, to change the terms.
(23)
This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say.
(24)
As a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.
(25)
The bubble floats above and through the world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction for many people, I've ceased to be a human being.
(26)
I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.
(27)
Bulletproof bubbles like this one are reality proof too.
(28)
Those who travel in them, like those who wear Tolkien's rings of invisibility, become wraithlike.
(29)
If they're not careful, they get lost in this phantom space.
(30)
A man may become the bubble that encases him, and then one day pop, he's gone forever.
(31)
It's ridiculous, isn't it, to have to say.
(32)
But I am a human being, unjustly accused, unjustly embubbled.
(33)
Or is it I who am being ridiculous as I call out from my bubble?
(34)
I'm still trapped in here, folks.
(35)
Somebody please Get Me Out.