TCU•
"wear and tear" (L.6) is the same as loss or damage resulting from ordinary use and exposure.
Read the following statements referring to Text II, and insert T (True) or F (False) in the parentheses accordingly.
( ) Don’t expect social outings and gettogethers to be much of a selling point for iGeners.
( ) iGeners are so focused on connecting in person that the social aspects of work hold high appeal.
( ) The use of social media has become integrated into the daily lives of most iGeners who have access to mobile technology.
( ) The increased use of mobile technology has caused iGeners to spend more time on their smartphones, and social media and has caused online relationship development to become a new generational norm.
The right order downwards is
Text VII questions 38 through 40World Bank Brazil country brief1 With an estimated 167 million inhabitants, Brazil has thelargest population in Latin America and ranks sixth in the world. Themajority live in the south-central area, which includes industrial cities4 such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. 80% of thepopulation now lives in urban areas. Rapid growth in the urbanpopulation has aided economic development but also created serious7 problems for major cities.Brazils miracle years were in the late 1960s and early 1970swhen double digit-annual growth rates were recorded and the structure10 of the economy underwent rapid change.In the 1980s, however, Brazils economic performance waspoor in comparison with its potential. Annual Gross Domestic Product13 (GDP) growth only averaged 1.5 percent over the period from 1980to 1993. This reflected the economys inability to respond tointernational eventsin the late 1970s and the 1980s: the second oil16 shock; increase in international real interest rates; the Latin Americanexternal debt crisis and the ensuing cutoff of foreign credit and foreigndirect investment. This lack of responsiveness reflected the largely19 inward-looking policy orientation that had been in place since the1960s.Economic flexibility was further impaired by provisions of the22 1988 Constitution, which introduced significant rigidities in budgetingand public expenditure. An outcome of these pressures was a steadyrise in the rate of inflation, which reached monthly rates of 50% by the25 middle of 1994.Internet: <http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/Exter/abe36259ca656c4985256914005207e3?OpenDocumen> (with adaptations). With the help of text VII, judge the following items.
Last century, Brazilian economy was affected by international factors.
TEXT 2
Innovation is the new key to survival
[…]
At its most basic, innovation presents an optimal strategy for controlling costs. Companies that have invested in such technologies as remote mining, autonomous equipment and driverless trucks and trains have reduced expenses by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously driving up productivity.
Yet, gazing towards the horizon, it is rapidly becoming clear that innovation can do much more than reduce capital intensity. Approached strategically, it also has the power to reduce people and energy intensity, while increasing mining intensity.
Capturing the learnings
The key is to think of innovation as much more than research and development (R&D) around particular processes or technologies. Companies can, in fact, innovate in multiple ways, such as leveraging supplier knowledge around specific operational challenges, redefining their participation in the energy value chain or finding new ways to engage and partner with major stakeholders and constituencies.
To reap these rewards, however, mining companies must overcome their traditionally conservative tendencies. In many cases, miners struggle to adopt technologies proven to work at other mining companies, let alone those from other industries. As a result, innovation becomes less of a technology problem and more of an adoption problem.
By breaking this mindset, mining companies can free themselves to adapt practical applications that already exist in other industries and apply them to fit their current needs. For instance, the tunnel boring machines used by civil engineers to excavate the Chunnel can vastly reduce miners" reliance on explosives. Until recently, those machines were too large to apply in a mining setting. Some innovators, however, are now incorporating the underlying technology to build smaller machines—effectively adapting mature solutions from other industries to realize more rapid results.
Re-imagining the future
At the same time, innovation mandates companies to think in entirely new ways. Traditionally, for instance, miners have focused on extracting higher grades and achieving faster throughput by optimizing the pit, schedule, product mix and logistics. A truly innovative mindset, however, will see them adopt an entirely new design paradigm that leverages new information, mining and energy technologies to maximize value. […]
Approached in this way, innovation can drive more than cost reduction. It can help mining companies mitigate and manage risks, strengthen business models and foster more effective community and government relations. It can help mining services companies enhance their value to the industry by developing new products and services. Longer-term, it can even position organizations to move the needle on such endemic issues as corporate social responsibility, environmental performance and sustainability.
(http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ru/Document s/energy-resource /ru_er_tracking_the_trends_2015_eng.pdf)
Innovation is the new key to survival
[…]
At its most basic, innovation presents an optimal strategy for controlling costs. Companies that have invested in such technologies as remote mining, autonomous equipment and driverless trucks and trains have reduced expenses by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously driving up productivity.
Yet, gazing towards the horizon, it is rapidly becoming clear that innovation can do much more than reduce capital intensity. Approached strategically, it also has the power to reduce people and energy intensity, while increasing mining intensity.
Capturing the learnings
The key is to think of innovation as much more than research and development (R&D) around particular processes or technologies. Companies can, in fact, innovate in multiple ways, such as leveraging supplier knowledge around specific operational challenges, redefining their participation in the energy value chain or finding new ways to engage and partner with major stakeholders and constituencies.
To reap these rewards, however, mining companies must overcome their traditionally conservative tendencies. In many cases, miners struggle to adopt technologies proven to work at other mining companies, let alone those from other industries. As a result, innovation becomes less of a technology problem and more of an adoption problem.
By breaking this mindset, mining companies can free themselves to adapt practical applications that already exist in other industries and apply them to fit their current needs. For instance, the tunnel boring machines used by civil engineers to excavate the Chunnel can vastly reduce miners" reliance on explosives. Until recently, those machines were too large to apply in a mining setting. Some innovators, however, are now incorporating the underlying technology to build smaller machines—effectively adapting mature solutions from other industries to realize more rapid results.
Re-imagining the future
At the same time, innovation mandates companies to think in entirely new ways. Traditionally, for instance, miners have focused on extracting higher grades and achieving faster throughput by optimizing the pit, schedule, product mix and logistics. A truly innovative mindset, however, will see them adopt an entirely new design paradigm that leverages new information, mining and energy technologies to maximize value. […]
Approached in this way, innovation can drive more than cost reduction. It can help mining companies mitigate and manage risks, strengthen business models and foster more effective community and government relations. It can help mining services companies enhance their value to the industry by developing new products and services. Longer-term, it can even position organizations to move the needle on such endemic issues as corporate social responsibility, environmental performance and sustainability.
(http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ru/Document s/energy-resource /ru_er_tracking_the_trends_2015_eng.pdf)
The fragment “To reap these rewards" (l. 17) means to:
According to the text, there will be a seamless network of Latin American stock exchanges, which means this network will
According to paragraph 2, a Latin American capital market is
ESAF•
Your answers to questions 21 to 24 must be based on the
text below entitled "A dip in the middle":
A dip in the middle
Source: The Economist (adapted)
Sep 8th 2005
Income tax has been paid in Britain for more
than two centuries. First introduced by William Pitt the
Younger to finance the war against Napoleonic France,
it is the Treasury´s biggest source of revenue, raising
30% of tax receipts. It arouses strong political emotions,
regarded as fair by some because it makes the rich pay a
bigger share of their income than the poor, but unfair by
others because it penalizes enterprise and hard work.
During the past 30 years, income tax has been
subject to sweeping changes, notably the cut in the top
rate from 98% to 40% under Margaret Thatcher between
1979 and 1988. Now another Conservative politician,
George Osborne, is floating a radical reform to match
that earlier exploit. The shadow chancellor announced
on September 7ththat he was setting up a commission
to explore the possible introduction of a flat income tax
in Britain.
Introducing a flat income tax into Britain would
involve two main changes. At present, there are three
marginal tax rates. These three rates would be replaced
by a single rate, which would be considerably lower than
the current top rate. At the same time there would be an
increase in the tax-free personal allowance, currently
worth 4,895 pounds.
The flat income tax
Based on the text above, judge the following items.
Films on-line are certainly a profitable business for Hollywood film industry.
TCU•
flash memory has become a major database storage in building portable information devices because of its nonvolatile, shock-resistant, power-economic nature, and fast access time for read operations.
TCU•
as a result of the life of its memory blocks, flash memory is the most popular storage media for information management in portable computing systems.
According to text LI-I,
software should keep up with technological information demands.
TCU•
A top-down systems oriented approach shows how different parties may contribute to safety, considering their organizational affiliations.
iGeners are ______________________.
I. likely to be called ‘technology dependent’
II. familiar with digital systems mostly as adults
III. so focused on connecting in person that the social aspects of work hold high appeal
According to the text, the sentence above can be correctly completed with the elements in
TCU•
In a public bidding, all conditions being the same, Brazilian companies have preference over foreign ones if there is a tie.
“As to face-to-face interaction, we can say iGeners ______________________ Millennials”.
TCU•
despite being hundreds of times faster than a hard disk in read operations, flash memory is now one of the best choices for portable information systems.
The text refers to Brazil´s economy as booming, which means it is experiencing a period of economic
The sentences that compose the missing paragraph Student-chosen texts (See “MISSING PARAGRAPH”.) are all scrambled below. Number them (1-5) in the correct order. Care for coherence and cohesion.
( ) Teachers who use this strategy find that it can lead to a classroom that is engaged with literature.
( ) Students are given a choice of literature from an age- and reading level-appropriate book collection.
( ) Allowing students to choose their own reading materials is a strategy that literacy specialists recommend as a way to develop lifelong readers.
( ) After a period of independent reading, students break into groups and discuss what they’ve read, book club-style, followed by journaling.
( ) When this strategy is successful, students are able to delve deeply into the meaning of the literature, develop critiquing skills, and have a valuable discussion with their classmates about the book that they chose.
The correct sequence downwards is
Based on the text above, judge the following items.
Nowadays, studios fear the sales of DVDs and VOD.
TCU•
due to advances in portable computing and Internet service technologies, applying traditional database technologies to flash memory databases on portable devices poses no difficulties.