1.1. The Military

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Put each of the following words or phrases in its correct place in the passage below.

aggressive cyberattacks forces defense conscription hostilities
insurgency intelligence poll recruits protocol spending
conscripted enlistment draft scrapping pool diplomats
soldiers
Image by Luca Melloni in Flickr. CC.

In 2010, Sweden ended a 109-year-old national tradition by abolishing its military . At the time, the decision seemed like an obvious one; only 5,000 soldiers were being into the army—a 10-percent sliver of the mandatory in Sweden during the height of the Cold War and the 1990s, when most European countries had compulsory service. “The obligatory military service had become both old-fashioned and ineffective,” read an editorial in Sweden’s paper of record at the time, effectively calling the move a belated acknowledgement of peacetime.

On Thursday, less than seven years later, Sweden formally announced it is bringing back. “The re-activating of conscription is needed for military readiness,” said Sweden’s defense minister. While the country has struggled to find enough volunteer since 2010, a spokesperson from Swedish ministry put the rationale a little more bluntly in an interview with the BBC: “The Russian illegal annexation of Crimea [in 2014], the conflict in Ukraine, and the increased military activity in our neighborhood are some of the reasons.”

In recent years, Sweden has alleged breaches of its airspace by Russian fighter jets and Russian activity in the Baltic Sea. In 2015, Wilhelm Unge, the head of Sweden’s agency Säpo, estimated that one-third of the working in the Russian embassy in Stockholm were spies. Following the publication of a similar report by Säpo last year, Sweden reportedly sustained a series of that it attributed to Russia.

In addition to the renascent conscription, regional are also having an effect on public opinion in Sweden. In 2014, a found that a majority of Swedes supported joining NATO for the first time ever. Two years earlier, that figure had been a paltry 17 percent. Meanwhile, military in the country, which dropped from 2.6 percent of the GDP in 1991 to 1.1 percent in 2015, went up 11 percent last year.

Sweden isn’t the only country in northern Europe taking more defensive postures. After conscription in 2008, Lithuania, which is a NATO member, reinstituted the draft in 2015 for men in the 19-to-26 age group. (Facing a pro-Russian in the east, Ukraine also reintroduced conscription in 2014, just months after suspending it.) Unsurprisingly, Sweden’s new conscription will take some of its inspiration from neighboring Norway, which features one of few gender-neutral fighting in the world. Its first enlistment begins in July and will draw from a of men and women born in 1999.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/03/sweden-conscription/518571/

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Objetivos

Click here to learn and revise vocabulary related to the military.

soldiers
Image by Karri Huhtanen in Flickr. CC.

The word "military" has a different pronunciation in General American /ˈmɪlɪˌteri/ and General British English /ˈmɪlɪt(ə)ri/.

Where the syllable preceding the suffixes -ary, -ery, -ory, -berry, -mony or -ative is unstressed, American English pronounces the antepenultimate syllable with a full vowel sound while British English reduces the vowel to a schwa or even elides it completely.

Other words in this category include inventory, testimony, innovative, contrary, corollary, honorary,imaginary, sedentary, secretary, migratory, conservatory,laboratory, lavatory...

However, there are exceptions like contradictory, compulsory or satisfactory, in which both accents use schwa. In case of doubt, check a good online pronunciation dictionary.

 


Conocimiento previo

Carl Sandburg
Image by Al Ravenna in Wikimedia. Public Domain.

Carl August Sandburg was born in 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois to August and Clara Sandburg, immigrants from Sweden who met and married in the United States. One of seven children, he left school at the age of 13 to work and help support his family. He volunteered for military service during the Spanish-American War and afterward, qualified as a veteran for college admission despite his lack of a high school diploma. At Lombard College in Galesburg, Sandburg began to write poetry and prose, and his first booklets were published.

Sandburg left college without graduating and worked as a traveling salesman before becoming an organizer and orator for the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 1907. At party headquarters, he met Lilian Steichen, younger sister of the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, who was already making a name for himself in New York and Paris.

Sandburg and Lilian Steichen were married in 1908, and moved to Chicago in 1912, where Sandburg went to work as a journalist, sometimes using a pseudonym and writing for business journals and socialist journals and newspapers. During nearly five decades as a newspaperman, he was a local news reporter, an investigative reporter, a war correspondent, a movie critic, and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Encouraged by his wife, Sandburg kept writing poetry, most of it free verse. His first serious recognition as a poet came in 1914 when several of his poems were published. Sandburg’s first book, Chicago Poems, was published in 1916, and his last collection of poems, Honey and Salt, appeared in 1963, when he was 85.

Sandburg was a popular performer, playing the guitar and singing American folk music, and reading his poetry and prose. In 1926 he published the two-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, and continued researching and writing Lincoln’s life. The four-volume Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, published in 1939, won the Pulitzer Prize in history. Sandburg’s Complete Poems (1950) received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

He also published stories and poems for children, an anthology of American folk music, an autobiography of his early years, and a novel, Remembrance Rock (1948). He collaborated with Edward Steichen, his brother-in-law, on the text for the landmark photographic exhibition and book, The Family of Man (1955).

Sandburg lived the last 22 years of his life at Connemara, a 245-acre farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina where he died in 1967 at the age of 89.

Adapted from: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/carl-sandburg-education-carl-sandburg-timeline/2320/

The Grass is a poem from Cornhuskers (1918)

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                I am the grass; I cover all.

 

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                What place is this?

                Where are we now?

 

                I am the grass.

                Let me work.

Austerlitz
Image by Uwe Brodrecht in Flickr. CC.