Baccalauréat · Série C · Anglais — 2024

Text: Measuring the rain

There are fewer weather stations in West Africa today than there were forty years ago. Equipment breaks down, spare parts are expensive, and a station that stops reporting is rarely replaced. Yet farmers have never needed reliable forecasts more than now, when the rains arrive later and stop earlier than their fathers remember.

In one province, a young engineer decided not to wait. Instead of asking for new automatic stations, she distributed two hundred plastic rain gauges to volunteers — teachers, nurses, village chiefs. Every morning, each of them measures the water collected during the night and sends the figure by text message.

The result surprised the meteorological service. Two hundred simple measurements, taken every day at the same hour, turned out to be more useful than three expensive stations. They showed something no satellite could see: that a storm can water one village heavily while leaving another, five kilometres away, completely dry.

The engineer is careful not to promise too much. « We are not replacing science », she says. « We are giving it eyes. » The volunteers receive no salary. What they receive is the forecast, sent back to them each week, in their own language.

Whether the system will survive is another question. Volunteers grow tired, telephones are lost, and no project lasts on goodwill alone. But for the moment, in that province, the rain is being measured — and somebody is listening.

Text written for this examination.

Topic

« We are not replacing science. We are giving it eyes. »

Can ordinary citizens contribute usefully to scientific work? Write an essay of 20 to 25 lines giving your opinion, with arguments and examples.