Due to unfavorable factors, dangerous conditions occurred in the delivery of electric energy in Poland. This was the most serious incident of its kind since the 1980’s. Such a serious incident raised concern about the safety of the electric power system in the summer and led to the formulation of conclusions for the future. In this article, the author analyses the conditions, which caused that situation. Poland was experiencing a doubt in August 2015, which along with an extremely high maximum daily temperature created remarkably unfavorable conditions for power plants and decreased the capacity of overhead power lines. Such unfavorable metrological conditions occurred not only in Poland, but also in Central-Eastern and Western Europe. It is worth emphasizing that the safety of electric energy delivery was endangered only in Poland. The improper renovation and upkeep policies, as well as unplanned outages in power plants caused a significant decrease of available power in the National Electric Power System. Unscheduled flows between Germany and Poland ruled out the possibility of importing electric energy at such a critical time. The author presents the correlation between the maximum daily air temperature in the sweltering heat and an increase in the demand for electric energy. Overall, unfavorable conditions posed a threat in the delivery of electric energy in Poland. In this article, the author draws attention to the report from the Supreme Audit Office (Najwyższa Izba Kontroli – NIK) from 2014, which predicted such a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, that report remained unnoticed. The author formulated appropriate solutions in order to increase the safety of electric energy delivery in the summer and to prevent such occurrences in the future.
This paper presents the results of a small-scale study into advanced trainee interpreters’ performance in tasks which involve consecutive interpretation of openly evaluative texts, with particular focus on the use of agentless structures and nominalizations by male and female subjects. It seeks answers to the following questions: i) Is the interpreter’s involvement in the ongoing discourse a factor that may elicit agentless structures in the output? ii) Does the preference for such constructions seem to be related to the gender of the interpreter? The analysis is based on 40 interpretations of four formal addresses, of which two express criticism and the other two praise of the audience. One text in each set is addressed to students of English at the University of Silesia, a group to which the trainee interpreters belong and with which they identify. The results indicate that while there is no substantial difference in the use of agentless structures in contexts which involve identification of the interpreter with the ultimate receiver and in contexts which preclude identification, nominalizations tend to be used slightly more frequently in the former set of circumstances. It also appears that female interpreters are more likely to use nominalizations in texts which express open evaluation of the audience with which they identify, irrespective of the direction of valuation.