When people don’t know how to behave towards a disabled person, it’s likely that they might slip up. These moments of awkwardness happen often in disabled people’s lives, the problems arise because they often lead to unintentional prejudice or social exclusion.
“End of the Awkward” was created to prevent these effects caused by “moments of awkwardness”.

3. What does a new survey reveal about people’s feelings when talking to disabled people?
Two people out of three feel uncomfortable talking to disabled people. 
The majority consists of young people, in particular young men. Some of them confessed that they avoided to interact with a disabled person because they didn’t know hot to communicate with them.

4. Apart from interacting with disabled people which other serious problems can arise according to spoke person for Scope Daniel Mazliah?
If the majority of interactions with disabled people involve awkwardness, involve someone avoiding them or being worried to say something wrong, then it starts to create a barrier in disabled people’s lives and it can effect their job, their workplace and their social relationships.

5. Even if disability is on the rise in developed countries, what other significant barriers do disabled people have to face every day?
They still experience inadequate policies and standards, lack of services, inadequate funding and lack of accessibility. Many disabled people struggle to pay their bills and their, often, expensive medicines.

Negative attitudes can influence their work life, they’re often overlooked for jobs because many employers are ill-informed. They can assume that disabled people aren’t smart enough, will take plenty of sick days and might frustrate the rest of the staff.

Give evidence.
4% of disabled people that answered the survey state that they suffered from physical attacks. Agressive and hostile behaviour and name-calling were also common.

Alex Brooker tackles the issue with light-hearted humour. 

9. What is Mazliah’s main concern on the decision to attempt  audience’s education via comedy?
There might be a risk to underplay the importance of the matter with comedy.

10. Treating disability by using humor on TV could have been very risky. How did they avoid this danger?
Mazliah adds that they think they found a balance by using humor to sensibilize people, meanwhile representing adequately disabled people.

PRODUCTION

The reading brings to light disabled people's difficulties in a world built for able-bodied people, even if they are part of the 15 percent of the global population and the numbers keep increasing.

The passage use information obtained by their survey and statistics to validate their facts, explaining and making it more tangible to us how often disabled people have to deal with prejudices and other barriers created by people's fear of difference, ignorance, and lack of awareness.

They also use the data attained from able-bodied and their experience when it comes to interacting with disabled people, observing that, in fact, many people feel uncomfortable in presence of a person that has disabilities, afraid to say the wrong thing or to offend the other somehow, ending up avoiding them and create a social exclusion.

One of the paragraphs faces the problem with a solution came up by Scope's campaign that uses humor to reduce the awkwardness between disabled and able-bodied people and tries to increase awareness, meanwhile representing respectfully the first category of people.

I think that laughing about something makes it more approachable, less scary and as a consequence, it's less troublesome socializing and keep a normal conversation despite the odds. 

Bringing up the matter is also a powerful tool to fight the indifference created by our own incompetence and poor knowledge and it's almost useless to point out the importance of including actively disabled people in our community and society. Many people with different kinds of disabilities had key rules in our history, for example in science we had a prominent figure like the deceased Stephen Hawking, that was challenged by a motor neuron disease, in arts we had the brilliant painter Vincent Van Gogh that suffered a mental illness, and the list goes on.

 

There isn't evidence of the crime Tom Robinson is charged with, the court relied upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not been called into serious question on cross-examination but has been also flatly contradicted by the defendant.

I think that the defence lawyer uses this simile ironically to underline the nature of this case, which concerns a white woman and a black man. 

Atticus is referring to our moral code, that regulates how we behave in society, and if you don't respect it you could become an outcast.

Mayela, the chief witness, breaks it because at the time white people couldn't engage in certain activities with black people.  

He feels pity for her because she didn't commit any crime but she had to get rid of her sins in this way to avoid to be condemned and outcasted by their society.

However, its pity ends when she decides to put an innocent man's life at stake.

The defence lawyer explains that the chief witness behaved like a child hiding stolen contraband, she tried to put the evidence of her guilt away from her and Tom Robinson, being the evidence above-mentioned, had to be destroyed.

Atticus adopts an accusatory tone referring to the witnesses of the State because they were confident no one would believe a black man's word in a matter that involves two respectable white people, and they were positive that the public's opinion would go along with them on the assumption that every black men are immoral beings and lie.

Atticus explains to the jury that this assumption is indeed not true because it's not due to whose race you belong to but is a characteristic of human race, there are immoral black men as there are immoral white men and there are respectable and moral black men as there are in the white community. 

He doesn't think people are equal as, for example, the public education put it because we aren't born in the same conditions, we don't have the same opportunities and we aren't smart in the same way, someone could be smarter than us and we can't do much about it. 

He's confident because he knows that the jury won't drop the chargers for his client, despite his well-made speech and his last request to let this poor man reunite with his family. He isn't naive enough and an idealist to believe blindly in the courts and jury system because it's a concrete institution composed by human beings, who are bound to fail sometimes, especially in cases that cover race issues.

It reflects the prejudices of the time against minorities that are labeled as inferior and furthermore not as virtuous as the dominant race: the white people. 

Atticus says that "a court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up", if the men who make it up are from the same society of the chief witness then they may have the same mindset that lead to this unfair situation.

Tom Robinson is one of the "mockingbirds" of this novel because he was found guilty due to evidence that wasn't cross-examined appropriately but was assumed accurate and reliable on the ground of the witnesses' race, who are white, unlike Tom Robinson who is a black man.

His only sin was that of pander to Mayella's desire. However, nowadays someone from an upper class who has certain vantages can be seen as an exploiter in this situation.

If we take as an example the #MeToo Movement that sparked last year, we can comprehend that a powerful person can take advantage of another one thanks to his status that strike fear for possible repercussions.

In this case, Tom Robinson could have endured this situation fearing for his job or for punishments.

Therefore he's totally an innocent man, who ended in trouble because of a white woman's whim and guilt.

Harper Lee uses this character to put emphasis on the hypocrisy of the society of small-town America, that should be ruled by a strict moral code but the ones who brag about following it are the first to break it. Minorities, seen as inferior, are considered poor of ethics and uneducated, bound to be criminals in the society's eyes. Although, in this case, is evident that the real "perpetrator" is someone unexpected in the basis of this theory. 

Worst of all is the reason that leads to these circumstances, Mayella was so scared about her reputation and worried to maintain her position in her community that she didn't think twice to ruin a man's life for her interests.

This is the result of a flawed code based about appearances rather than virtues that ruled American small-towns in the '30s.  

They talked a bit about unimportant topics such as the weather, the war and their jobs, often sitting looking at the fire.

Sometimes the protagonist would make tea, later on he would realize that he could have bought beer for when she came, but it never occurred to him at the time.

She visited him every Thursday.

They enjoyed each other company.

You can found out that the woman was in need for money with the following quote from the text: “And she wouldn't leave without borrowing a few shillings.”.

He didn’t mind giving her money, to him it was a pleasure to help her.

She often mentioned how beautiful she thought it was.

He thought it would end up in a pawnshop, he preferred to lend her money instead.

9. Why did the woman want it? 

She wanted to feel the pleasure of pawning it, to have someone else buy it so that it wouldn't belong to either of them anymore.

10. Did the protagonist get the picture back from the pawnshop? 

No he didn’t, but later he wished he had because then the woman had an accident.

1. In this period of economic crisis the number of people who pawn their most precious things has increased. How do you think a person feels in that situation? Discuss your view on the topic by writing a 300-word paragraph. 

People have to recur to desperate measures in time of crisis to be able to provide food and shelter to their beloved ones if they have a family, sometimes the money is short even when you have to support economically just yourself. This may happen if you’re a young adult because it’s difficult to get a stable and well-remunerated job in your early 20s, encouraging a lot of my peers to decide to seek jobs in other countries that offer higher pays, but also many older people have been sent at home without a job due to today’s economic situation.

One of the last resort to gain some money is to pawn your most valuable objects. They can be very meaningful because in some cases they are inherited, which means they also have sentimental value. 

For example is common that wristwatches are bequeathed from grandfathers to their sons that at one point are going to give it to their children as a well, creating a family’s treasure. 

In every family run through generations one of these items that usually have a story behind them, making us feeling nostalgic about our late relatives and they help revive their memory.

If it happens that one of these objects has also an indifferent economic value, then it’s probably going to be sold if you’re in need of money but this decision comes with a huge price if you’re a nostalgic person and feel attached to it, because you’re giving away a part of your heritage that was supposed to stay within your family to be seen by your grandsons and - daughters, hopefully passing it on for a long time.

Nevertheless, if a wristwatch can impact your livelihood and help you to keep your family on their feet and under the same roof, it’s more worthy separate yourself from it than keep it.

It’s still possible to keep alive the relic of a relative by sharing their stories and the episodes your most fond of them to your children.