Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
Most people would guess that the selfie was around the beginning of this century or perhaps a bit later when smartphones became mainstream. But most people would be wrong, just as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were wrong when they declared on Twitter in 2017 that they had invented the selfie eleven years previously. In fact, they were around 167 years too late to make that claim. The oldest existing selfie dates back to 1839 when photographer Robert Cornelius took a self-portrait photograph of himself. To achieve this, he had to uncover the lens, run to his place and pose in the same position for up to fifteen minutes and then run back to cover the lens again. Cornelius couldn't take a dozen shots and choose the best one - his selfie had to be just one photo. Half a century later, in 1914, thirteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia took a picture of herself in a mirror and became the first teenager to take a selfie.
The origin of the word ‘selfies’ is thought to come from Australia where people have a habit of putting -ie on the end of words - barbie for barbecue, postie for postal worker and even Aussie for Australian. In 2002, an Australian man took a photo of an injury to his lip and put it up on a public forum to ask for advice on how to treat it. He referred to the photo as a selfie, and the term was born. Selfie became Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year in 2013.
A 2017 study into 'selfitis', as the obsessive taking of selfies has been called, found a range of motivations, from seeking to feel more part of a group to shaking off depressive thoughts and - of course - capturing a memorable moment. Since we live so much of our lives online, there is pressure to present good quality images, and so it is no surprise that airbrushing apps that enable people toretouch images and present an idealised version of themselves are gaining popularity.
(Adapted from Discovery)
