way2go! 7. Practice Pack, Arbeitsheft

30 UNIT 05 | Live and learn Read the text about private study schools in South Korea, then choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D) for questions 1–7. Put a cross ( ) in the correct box. The first one (0) has been done for you. READING 4 Teacher, leave those kids alone On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, South Korea, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission sounds very strange: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, pupils are expected to achieve at such high academic levels and study so hard that most of them attend private, after- hours tutoring academies called ‘hagwons’. These private classes sometimes take place late into the night, meaning that some pupils study until 2 a.m., then get up for school again at 6 a.m. To reduce the country’s addiction to hagwons, the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew 1 , making sure they do not stay open after 10 p.m. The raid 2 starts in a relaxed way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, an official at Seoul’s Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent cases, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a hagwon cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. “There was no place to hide,” Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to calm the students. “I told them, ‘It’s the hagwon that’s breaking the law, not you. You can go home.’” Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. “We don’t leave at 10 p.m. sharp,” he explains. “We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses.” Finally, we head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul’s busiest hagwon districts. The streets are filled with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located – above the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Kraze Burgers – looking for signs of light behind the closed curtains. At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off 3 . They enter an old building and climb the stairs. On the second floor, the unit’s female member knocks on the door. “Hello? Hello!” she calls loudly. A voice calls back from within, “Just a minute!” The inspectors glance at one another. “Just a minute” is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins. Cramming 4 is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades – and often nothing else – have long been seen as essential for professional success. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. In Seoul, thousands of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation’s top three universities. At the end of their evening patrol at about midnight, Cha and his team stop work. They have managed to find a total of 40 pupils studying in various illegal hagwons. He lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily freed 40 teenagers out of 4 million. 1 curfew: Ausgangsverbot 2 raid: Razzia 3 tip-off: Hinweis 4 cramming: intensives Lernen, Büffeln Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv