Fiche - Mythes et Héros - Anglais Oral Bac

Myths and Heroes

We are going to deal with the notion Myths And Heroes. To begin with, i would like to give a definition of the notion. A myth is a popular belief on which social values are often based, while a hero can be someone who is ready to sacrifice his or her life in order to make things evolve positively. In relation to the notion, the subject of my presentation will be the opposition between two war heroes. Thus, we may ask : What is really a hero ? First we are going to talk about the British mathematician Alan Turing, and then, we will talk about the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa. Finally, we will conclude on the relation between these two heroes.

¤ Alan Turing was a British code-breaker whose work is often credited with cracking the German Enigma code and hepling end World War II. In order to do this, he created a machine, the computer ancestor, that decrypted the Nazi code and permitted to anticipate German attacks. Thanks to his work, approximately 22 million lives were saved. So despite his communication problems and his solitary life, he was a warhero, but not like normal soldiers who fought on the front, not like resistants who hid in the wild, not like civilians who endured bombing and destruction.

¤ Endre Friedman, alias Robert Capa, was the greatest war photographer who ever lived. He left home at age 18 bound for Germany, but soon found himself fleeing to Paris with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. A displaced jew, Friedman encountered anti-semitism wherever he travelled, making it difficult to pursue his carrer as a photojournalist. But under the American sounding alias “Robert Capa”, he was able to find great success, covering firts the Spanish Civil War, and then later World War II. He was very courageous, and thanks to him, everybody could observe the reality of the war.

¤ Thus, to conclude, we can say that Alan Turing and Robert Capa are two very different persons, but both of them are war heroes. Both of them helped the world in some way or in another.

...