Questões de Concursos Inglês

(ESPM SP/2010)

TV Will Save the World
By Charles Kenny

‘Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around. Indeed, for many of the poorest regions of the world, it remains the next big thing – poised, finally, to attain truly global ubiquity. And that is a good thing, because the TV revolution is changing lives for the better.

Across the developing world, around 45% of households had a TV in 1995; by 2005 the number had climbed above 60%. That’s some way behind the U.S., where there are more TVs than people, but it dwarfs worldwide Internet access. Five million more households in sub-Saharan Africa will get a TV over the next five years. In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban, which had outlawed TV, 1 in 5 Afghans had one. The global total is another 150 million by 2013 – pushing the numbers to well beyond two-thirds of households.

Television’s most transformative impact will be on the lives of women. In India, researchers Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that when cable TV reached villages, women were more likely to go to the market without their husbands’ permission and less likely to want a boy rather than a girl. They were more likely to make decisions over child health care and less likely to think that men had the right to beat their wives. TV is also a powerful medium for adult education. In the Indian state of Gujarat, Chitrageet is a hugely popular show that plays Bollywood song and dance clips. The routines are subtitled in Gujarati. Within six months, viewers had made a small but significant improvement in their reading skills.

Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike.

(Wednesday, Mar. 11, 2010 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971118,00.html)

Read the text below entitled 10 Ways to Protect Your
Privacy Online in order to answer questions 17 to
20:

10 Ways to Protect Your Privacy Online
Source: www.newsweek.com (Adapted) Oct, 22nd 2010


Up to a couple of years ago, I used to say that
the average person could protect his or her privacy
on the Web. Even as the founder of an online
reputation-management company, I believed it was
possible so long as you were willing to commit some
time doing it. Today, I tell people this: the landscape
of personal data mining and exploitation is shifting
faster than ever; trying to protect your online privacy
is like trying to build your own antivirus software
really, really difficult. But whether or not you have the
time (or money) to invest in the pros, there are a few
simple steps we can all take to reduce the risk to our
private data.

1. Do not put your full birth date on your social-
networkingprofiles.
Identity thieves use birth dates as cornerstones
of their craft. If you want your friends to know your
birthday, try just the month and day, and leave out
the year.


2. Use multiple usernames and passwords.
Keep your usernames and passwords for social
networks, online banking, e-mail, and online shopping
all separate. Having distinct passwords is not enough
nowadays: if you have the same username across
different Web sites, your entire life can be mapped
and re-created with simple algorithms.

3. Shred.
If you are going to throw away credit-card offers, bank
statements, or anything else that might come in hard
copy to your house, rip them up into tiny bits first.

Text 2

What’s in a name?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1989)

The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self.

- James Baldwin, 1961

… blood, darky, Tar baby, Kaffir, shine… moor, blackamoor, Jim Crow, spook… quadroon, meriney, red bone, high yellow… Mammy, porch monkey, home, homeboy, George… spearchucker, Leroy, Smokey…mouli, buck, Ethiopian, brother, sistah…

- Trey Ellis, 1989

I had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Elli’s essay, “Remember My Name,” in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989). But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the bynames of “the race” (“the race” or “our people” being the terms my parents used in polite or reverential discourse, “jigaboo” or “nigger” more commonly used in anger, jest, or pure disgust), it was: “George”. Now the events of that very brief exchange return to my mind so vividly that I wonder why I had forgotten it.

My father and I were walking home at dusk from his second job. He “moonlighted” as a janitor in the evenings for the telephone company. Every day, but Saturday, he would come home at 3:30 from his regular job at the paper Mill, wash up, eat supper, then at 4:30 head downtown to his second job. He used to make jokes frequently about a union official who moonlighted. I never got the joke, but he and his friends thought it was hilarious. All I knew was that my family always ate well, that my brother and I had new clothes to wear, and that all of the white people in Piedmont, West Virginia, treated my parents with an odd mixture of resentment and respect that even we understood at the time had something directly to do with a small but certain measure of financial security.

He had left a little early that evening because I was with him and I had to be in bed early. I could not have been more than five or six, and we had stopped off at the Cut-Rate Drug Store (where no black person in town but my father could sit down to eat, and eat off real plates with real silverware) so that I could buy some caramel ice cream, two scoops in a wafer cone, please, which I was busy licking when Mr. Wilson walked by.

Mr. Wilson was a very quiet man, whose stony, brooding, silent manner seemed designed to scare off any overtures of friendship, even from white people. He was Irish as was one-third of our village (another third being Italian), the more affluent among whom sent their children to “Catholic School” across the bridge in Maryland. He had white straight hair, like my Uncle Joe, whom he uncannily resembled, and he carried a black worn metal lunch pail, the kind that Riley carried on the television show. My father always spoke to him, and for reasons that we never did understand, he always spoke to my father.

“Hello, Mr. Wilson,” I heard my father say.

“Hello, George.”

I stopped licking my ice cream cone, and asked my Dad in a loud voice why Mr. Wilson had called him “George.”

“Doesn’t he know your name, Daddy? Why don’t you tell him your name? Your name isn’t George.”

For a moment I tried to think of who Mr. Wilson was mixing Pop up with. But we didn’t have any Georges among the colored people in Piedmont; nor were there colored Georges living in the neighboring towns and working at the Mill.

“Tell him your name, Daddy.”

“He knows my name, boy,” my father said after a long pause. “He calls all colored people George.”

A long silence ensued. It was “one of those things”, as my Mom would put it. Even then, that early, I knew when I was in the presence of “one of those things”, one of those things that provided a glimpse, through a rent curtain, at another world that we could not affect but that affected us. There would be a painful moment of silence, and you would wait for it to give way to a discussion of a black superstar such as Sugar Ray or Jackie Robinson.

“Nobody hits better in a clutch than Jackie Robinson.”

“That’s right. Nobody.”

I never again looked Mr. Wilson in the eye.

Your answers to questions 28 to 30 must be based on
the text below entitled "The real medicine":

The real medicine
Source: Newsweek (adapted)
Oct 17th 2005

People who survive a heart attack often
describe it as a wake-up call. But for a 61-year old
executive I met recently, it was more than that. This
man was in the midst of a divorce when he was
stricken last spring, and he had fallen out of touch
with friends and family members. The executive´s
doctor, unaware of the strife in his life, counseled him
to change his diet, start exercising and quit smoking.
He also prescribed drugs to lower cholesterol and
blood pressure. It was sound advice, but in combing
the medical literature, the patient discovered that he
needed to do more. Studies suggested that his risk of
dying within six months would be four times greater
if he remained depressed and lonely. So he joined
a support group and reordered his priorities, placing
relationships atthe top of the list instead of the bottom.
His health has improved steadily since then, and so
has his outlook on life. In fact he now describes his
heart attack as the best thing that ever happened to
him. "Yes, my arteries are more open," he says. "But
even more important, I´m more open."

Leia o trecho abaixo e responda às questões de 41 a 45.

Brazilian Forces Claim Victory in Gang Haven

RIO DE JANEIRO – In a quick and decisive military operation, Brazilian security forces took control of this city?s most notorious slum on Sunday, celebrating victory over drug gangs after a weeklong battle.
In the early afternoon, the military police raised the flags of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro atop a building on the highest hill in the Alemão shantytown complex, providing a rare moment of happiness and celebration in a decades–long battle to rid this city?s violent slums of drug gangs. An air of calm and relief swept through the neighborhood, as residents opened their windows and began walking the streets. Dozens of children ran from their houses in shorts and bikinis to jump into a swimming pool that used to belong to a gang leader. Residents congregated around televisions in bars and restaurants, cheering for the police as if they were cheering for their favorite soccer teams. "Now the community is ours," Jovelino Ferreira, a 60–year–old pastor, said, his eyes filling with tears. "This time it will be different. We have to have faith. Many people who didn?t deserve have suffered here."