Questões de Concursos Inglês

T E X T

Britain, Norway and the United States join forces with businesses to protect tropical forests.

Britain, Norway and the United States said Thursday they would join forces with some of the world’s biggest companies in an effort to rally more than $1 billion for countries that can show they are lowering emissions by protecting tropical forests. The goal is to make intact forests more economically valuable than they would be if the land were cleared for timber and agriculture.

The initiative comes as the world loses acre after acre of forests to feed global demand for soy, palm oil, timber and cattle. Those forests, from Brazil to Indonesia, are essential to limiting the linked crises of climate change and a global biodiversity collapse. They are also home to Indigenous and other forest communities. Amazon, Nestlé, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Salesforce are among the companies promising money for the new initiative, known as the LEAF Coalition.

Last year, despite the global downturn triggered by the pandemic, tropical deforestation was up 12 percent from 2019, collectively wiping out an area about the size of Switzerland. That destruction released about twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as cars in the United States emit annually.

“The LEAF Coalition is a groundbreaking example of the scale and type of collaboration that is needed to fight the climate crisis and achieve net-zero emissions globally by 2050,” John Kerry, President Biden’s senior climate envoy, said in a statement. “Bringing together government and privatesector resources is a necessary step in supporting the large-scale efforts that must be mobilized to halt deforestation and begin to restore tropical and subtropical forests.”

An existing global effort called REDD+ has struggled to attract sufficient investment and gotten mired in bureaucratic slowdowns. This initiative builds on it, bringing private capital to the table at the country or state level. Until now, companies have invested in forests more informally, sometimes supporting questionable projects that prompted accusations of corruption and “greenwashing,” when a company or brand portrays itself as an environmental steward but its true actions don’t support the claim.

The new initiative will use satellite imagery to verify results across wide areas to guard against those problems. Monitoring entire jurisdictions would, in theory, prevent governments from saving forestland in one place only to let it be cut down elsewhere.

Under the plan, countries, states or provinces with tropical forests would commit to reducing deforestation and degradation. Each year or two, they would submit their results, calculating the number of tons of carbon dioxide reduced by their efforts. An independent monitor would verify their claims using satellite images and other measures. Companies and governments would contribute to a pool of money that would pay the national or regional government at least $10 per ton of reduced carbon dioxide.

Companies will not be allowed to participate unless they have a scientifically sound plan to reach net zero emissions, according to Nigel Purvis, the chief executive of Climate Advisers, a group affiliated with the initiative. “Their number one obligation to the world from a climate standpoint is to reduce their own emissions across their supply chains, across their products, everything,” Mr. Purvis said. He also emphasized that the coalition’s plans would respect the rights of Indigenous and forest communities.

From: www.nytimes.com/April 22, 2021

T E X T

I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left

Social Media.

By Bianca Brooks

“What’s happening?”

I stare blankly at the little box as I try to think of something clever for my first tweet. I settle on what’s at the top of my mind: “My only #fear is being a nobody.” How could I know this exchange would begin a dialogue that would continue nearly every day for the next nine years of my life?

I began using Twitter in 2010 as a newly minted high school freshman. Though it began as a hub for my quirky adolescent thoughts, over the years it became an archive of my emotional and intellectual voice — a kind of virtual display for the evolution of my politics and artistic identity. Butafter nine years, it was time to close the archive. My wanting to share my every waking thought became eclipsed by a desire for an increasingly rare commodity — a private life.

Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return. One message read: “Not to be over familiar, but you have to come back eventually. You’re a writer after all. How will we read your writing?” Another follower inquired, “Where will you go?”

The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever

Over time, I have begun to sense these messages reveal more than a lack of respect for privacy. I realize that to many millennials, a life without a social media presence is not simply a private life; it is no life at all: We possess a widespread, genuine fear of obscurity.

When I consider the near-decade I have spent on social media, this worry makes sense. As with many in my generation, Twitter was my entry into conversations happening on a global scale; long before my byline graced any publication, tweeting was how I felt a part of the world. Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you. For years I poured my opinions, musings and outrage onto my timeline, believing I held an indispensable place in a vital sociopolitical experiment.

But these passionate, public observations were born of more than just a desire to speak my mind — I was measuring my individual worth in constant visibility. Implicit in my follower’s question “Where will you go?” is the resounding question “How will we know where you’ve gone?” Privacy is considered a small exchange for the security of being well known and well liked.

After all, a private life boasts no location markers or story updates. The idea that the happenings of our lives would be constrained to our immediate families, friends and real-life communities is akin to social death in a world measured by followers, views, likes and shares.

I grow weary when I think of this as the new normal for what is considered to be a fruitful personal life. Social media is no longer a mere public extension of our private socialization; it has become a replacement for it. What happens to our humanity when we relegate our real lives to props for the performance of our virtual ones?

For one, a predominantly online existence can lull us into a dubious sense of having enacted concrete change, simply because of a tweet or Instagram post. As “hashtag activism” has obscured longstanding traditions of assembly and protest, there’s concern that a failure to transition from the keyboard to in-person organization will effectively stall or kill the momentum of political movements. (See: Occupy Wall Street.)

The sanctity of our most intimate experiences is also diminished. My grandfather Charles Shaw — a notable musician whose wisdoms and jazz scene tales I often shared on Twitter — passed away last year. Rather than take adequate time to privately mourn the loss of his giant influence in my life alongside those who loved him most, I quickly posted a lengthy tribute to him to my followers. At the time I thought, “How will they remember him if I don’t acknowledge his passing?”

Perhaps at the root of this anxiety over being forgotten is an urgent question of how one ought to form a legacy; with the rise of automation, a widening wealth gap and an unstable political climate, it is easy to feel unimportant. It is almost as if the world is too big and we are much too small to excel in it in any meaningful way. We feel we need as many people as possible to witness our lives, so as not to be left out of a story that is being written too fast by people much more significant than ourselves.

“The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow,” the writer Anais Nin said. “This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”

I think of those words and at once any fear of obscurity is eclipsed by much deeper ones — the fear of forgoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone, of not bearing witness to the incredible lives of those who surround me.

I observe the world around me. It is big and moving fast. “What’s happening?” I think to myself.

I’m just beginning to find out.

From:www.nytimes.com/Oct. 1, 2019

THANKSGIVING FOOD REVEALS A LOT ABOUT THE COUNTRY

What was on the table at the first Thanksgiving?

Much of the way that Americans remember the first Thanksgiving in its elementary school presentation is a myth. There were complex relationships among the British colonists and the Wampanoag Indigenous people they encountered, and later fought against, in what is today southeast Massachusetts. The idea of a huge breast-forward turkey and apple pie on those original tables is also a myth.

There are two primary-source historical records that give us a clue as to what was part of the 1621 feast. They suggest that the feast likely consisted of wild turkey and other fowl, venison, cod, bass, and corn. These are foods that would have been indigenous to the Americas, and the Northeast in particular, before the so-called Columbian Exchange that promoted cross-fertilization between the Americas on the one hand and Europe, Asia, and Africa on the other.

Apple pie, for example, wouldn't have been there because apples' botanical origin is in central Asia. They had barely been brought to the Americas by the time of the 1621 feast.

How did Thanksgiving evolve into the holiday it is today?

After that first Thanksgiving, the event receded from memory for two centuries. Then, in the early 1800s, some shaky historical evidence of that 17th century meal was unearthed. Amid a lot of tension over slavery and immigration, some leaders sought to elevate the bit of Colonial history as a unifying project that could bring a divided nation together. From there, the influence of home economics, advertising, industrial food production, animal science, factory farm breeding, and other transformations have made the Thanksgiving meal into one of abundance, standardization, and shortcut home cooking.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a very popular women's magazine called Godey's Lady's Book, wanted to create a Thanksgiving celebration as a project of national unity. For many years, she petitioned sitting presidents to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She finally succeeded with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, when he passed the Thanksgiving Proclamation in October 1863.

Lincoln doesn't actually reference the 1621 event at all, but he suggested that the Thanksgiving holiday was about national unity in the midst of the Civil War—a project I think we can all get behind.

Why are foods such as turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie Thanksgiving dinner staples?

Godey's Lady's Book was a major platform for Hale's advocacy on behalf of Thanksgiving, and the magazine published recipes and suggestions for ways readers could celebrate the holiday, even before it was official. Many of the Thanksgiving foods recommended in the magazine were those that have become very popular:roast turkey, herbed dressing, creamed onions, mashed potatoes.

American food tastes became more standardized around the turn of the 20th century with the rise of the field of home economics. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School was a leading precursor of the movement. A November 1908 issue of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine, for example, featured dishes ideal for Thanksgiving, such as roast chickens, a garnish of fresh cranberries on the stem, and mashed potatoes.

Some popular foods, like pumpkins and cranberries, do have some links to Indigenous foods with botanical origins in the Americas. They became much more available due to the rise of companies that produced and processed these products.

Why is food such an important part of Thanksgiving?

First, at least in much of the US, it's one of the last fall holidays before winter begins. We acknowledge the fleeting harvest and the dark days to come. Even in a modern society where food is plentiful, it harkens back to the period in all of the preceding human history when winter was a time of scarce resources and often of hunger. So filling up with good food with what remained from the end-of-summer and fall harvests was a way to celebrate.

Thanksgiving is one of the few remaining occasions on which many people cook meals at home—even if they're often relying on mixes and packaged ingredients. The need to coordinate oven schedules, to give real thought to thawing times, to prep ingredients in advance, to devote significant time to cooking—this is all the kind of labor, especially women's labor, that had long been the mainstay of the American kitchen. In this way, food as part of Thanksgiving connects us back to the full spectrum of experience around cooking.

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More Than Just Children's Books

Krumulus, a small bookstore in Germany, has everything a kid could want: parties, readings, concerts, plays, puppet shows, workshops and book clubs.

“I knew it was going to be very difficult to open a bookstore, everyone tells you you're crazy, there will be no future,” says Anna Morlinghaus, Krumulus's founder. Still, she wanted to try. A month before her third son was born, she opened the store in Berlin's Kreuzberg district.

BERLIN — On a recent Saturday afternoon, a hush fell in the bright, airy “reading-aloud” room at Krumulus, a small children's bookstore in Berlin, as Sven Wallrodt, one of the store's employees, stood up to speak. Brandishing a newly published illustrated children's book about the life of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, he looked at the crowd of eager, mo stly school-aged children and their parents. “Welcome to this book presentation”, he said. “If you fall asleep, snore quietly”. Everyone laughed, but no one fell asleep. An hour later, the children followed Wallrodt down to the bookstore's basement workshop, whe re he showed them how Gutenberg fit leaden block letters into a metal plate. Then the children printed their own bookmark using a technique similar to Gutenberg's, everyone was thrilled.

(Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/books/berlin-germany-krumulus.html)

CAGED BIRD

Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

Adaptado de ANGELOU, M. “Caged Bird” In: The Poetry Foundation (website). Disponível em www.poetryfoundation.org

Nota sobre a autora: Maya Angelou (1924-2014) foi uma poeta norte-americana que explorou em suas obras temas como a segregação racial, a desigualdade de gêneros e a opressão social entre outros.

Ancient dreams of intelligent machines: 3,000 years of robots

The French philosopher René Descartes was reputedly fond of automata: they inspired his view that living things were biological machines that function like clockwork. Less known is a strange story that began to circulate after the philosopher’s death in 1650. This centred on Descartes’s daughter Francine, who died of scarlet fever at the age of five.

According to the tale, a distraught Descartes had a clockwork Francine made: a walking, talking simulacrum. When Queen Christina invited the philosopher to Sweden in 1649, he sailed with the automaton concealed in a casket. Suspicious sailors forced the trunk open; when the mechanical child sat up to greet them, the horrified crew threw it overboard.

The story is probably apocryphal. But it sums up the hopes and fears that have been associated with human-like machines for nearly three millennia. Those who build such devices do so in the hope that they will overcome natural limits – in Descartes’s case, death itself. But this very unnaturalness terrifies and repulses others. In our era of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), those polarized responses persist, with pundits and the public applauding or warning against each advance. Digging into the deep history of intelligent machines, both real and imagined, we see how these attitudes evolved: from fantasies of trusty mechanical helpers to fears that runaway advances in technology might lead to creatures that supersede humanity itself.

(Disponível em: <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05773-y)