New App Helps Icelanders Avoid Dating Relatives

Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.

Have you heard about someone falling in love with someone, but found out they are relatives?

In your country what do you have to know about someone if you want to marry them?

Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning.

 The answers are below the table.

"Everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and meeting a girl you hooked up with some time ago," said Einar Magnusson, a graphic designer in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik. It seems that a common problem in Iceland is the possibility of dating someone who you are closely related to.

Imagine you meet someone that you feel a lot of chemistry with, but then you discover that you are cousins or closely related and so it’s a relationship that can’t be possible. This is a problem in Iceland, a country with only 320,000 people. Well a new smart phone app has come to the rescue. Now Icelanders can bump their phones together when they first meet and a warning bell makes a sound if the two people are closely related. Some are hailing this as a long time needed solution to a common type of social embarrassment in Iceland.

The new app has an advantage due to the fact that Icelanders have kept accurate records of their families for the past 1000 years. Actually, Icelanders like keeping records and being organized. Perhaps an example of this is that Iceland has the world’s oldest parliament.  The person who made this app has been able to use a variety of records in Iceland that trace the genealogy of 95% of the population over the past 300 years. And this new app is already proving popular. It was more than 4,000 downloads since it was first launched early April. And another reason that this app has taken off is that Icelanders have a love for genealogy. However, the designer of the app hopes that this app won’t create a wrong impression of Icelanders.