Mark Zuckerberg’s 650 Million Friends (and counting)
Back in June 2009, the globe’s potpourri of social-networking sites was extremely diverse: Google’s Orkut dominated India and Brazil; Central and South America preferred Hi5; Maktoob was king in the Arab world. The Vietnamese liked Zing, the Czechs loved Lidé, South Koreans surfed Cyworld. Two years after that, and Facebook has stolen users away from its rivals very fast. It’s completely knocked Hi5 off the map in former strongholds such as Peru, Mexico, and Thailand. After a tense back-and-forth with Orkut in India, Facebook has emerged victorious. And it’s becoming more popular in Armenia, Georgia, and the Netherlands, where local providers are making a desperate last stand.
There are some glaring exceptions to Facebook’s colonization kick. Russians continue to use Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, with Facebook a distant fourth in the rankings. China remains highly committed to domestic sites such as Qzone and Renren. But for the rest of us, we’re living in Zuckerberg’s world.
(endereço eletrônico omitido propositadamente)
According to the text, Facebook’s boom on the Internet was in
" No other country would give Syrians a visa, he recalls over a cup of Syrian coffee in the one-room apartment he shares with wife, two-year-old son and brother-inlaw, in the Cambuci district of São Paulo.We could have tried to get to Europe illegally by boat, but that was too dangerous for my family. So Brazil was the only safe choice."
According to the text, the total number of people who live in the one-room apartment in Cambuci is:
You leave the supermarket and go straight to Heathrow to meet an old friend of yours. But at the entrance, you find the above sign which means you _____ enter.
Complete the passage below with the correct form of the verb in parentheses.Then choose the correct alternative.
Name a celebrity and Naomi Stein _______ probably ______________(1) them. She_______________(2) famous for her photos of John Lennon and The Rolling Stones.
Her new book, The Female Gaze ___________________(3) a hundred intimate portraits of different types of women. Last night Dave Weich_____________(4) Naomi in New York, where she _______________(5) tohim four of her favorite photographs.
Based on the text above, judge the following items We can often afford to have a ten person-year effort or one person working for ten years when developing a software project.
due to advances in portable computing and Internet service technologies, applying traditional database technologies to flash memory databases on portable devices poses no difficulties.
It now seems to me that what matters most in the majority
of organizations is to have reasonably intelligent, hard-working
managers who have a sense of pride and loyalty toward their
organization; who can get to the root of a problem and are inclined
toward action; who are decent human beings with a natural empathy
and concern for people; who possess humor, humility, and common
sense; and who are able to couple drive with stick-to-it-iveness* and
patience in the accomplishment of a goal.
It is the ability to make positive things happen that most
distinguishes the successful manager from the mediocre or
unsuccessful one. It is far better to have dependable managers who
can make the right things happen in a timely fashion than to have
brilliant, sophisticated, highly educated executives who are excellent
at planning and analyzing, but who are not so good at implementing.
The most cherished manager is the one who says “I can do it,” and
then does.
Many business schools continue to focus almost exclusively
on the development of analytical skills. As a result, these schools are
continuing to graduate large numbers of students who know a great
deal about analyzing strategies, dissecting balance sheets, and using
computers — but who still don’t know how to manage!
As a practical matter, of course, schools can go only so far
in teaching their students to manage. Only actual work experience
will fully develop the kinds of managerial traits, skills, and virtues
that I have discussed here.
*the ability and determination to continue doing something despite difficulties.
Wegman, Knezevic, Bernstein. A reading skills book, 3.d
ed. Mac Graw-Hill Companies, Inc. (adapted).
Based on the text above, judge the items below.
Today, many schools are not preparing future workers the right
way.
The underlined item “shruging” (line 82) is a nonsense word, merely invented for the purposes of this exam. After analyzing the co-text and context, it is correct to conclude that “shruging” means
For more than half a century, immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies have added variety and diversity to the rich patchwork of accents and dialects spoken in the UK. British colonisers originally exported the language to all four corners of the globe and migration in the 1950s brought altered forms of English back to these shores. ___________(1) that time, especially in urban areas, speakers of Asian and Caribbean descent have blended their mother tongue speech patterns with existing local dialects producing wonderful new varieties of English, ___________(2) London Jamaican or Bradford Asian English. Standard British English has also been enriched by an explosion of new terms, such as balti (a dish invented in the West Midlands and defined by a word that would refer to a "bucket" rather than food to most South Asians outside the UK) and bhangra (traditional Punjabi music mixed with reggae and hiphop).
The recordings on this site of speakers from minority ethnic backgrounds include a range of speakers. You can hear speakers whose speech is heavily influenced by their racial background, alongside those whose speech reveals nothing of their family background and some who are ranged somewhere in between. There are also a set of audio clips that shed light on some of the more recognisable features of Asian English and Caribbean English.
Slang
As with the Anglo-Saxon and Norman settlers of centuries past, the languages spoken by today’s ethnic communities have begun to have an impact on the everyday spoken English of other communities. For instance, many young people, regardless of their ethnic background, now use the black slang terms, nang (‘cool,’) and diss (‘insult’ — from ‘disrespecting’) or words derived from Hindi and Urdu, such as chuddies (‘underpants’) or desi (‘typically Asian’). Many also use the all-purpose tag-question, innit — as in statements such as you’re weird, innit. This feature has been variously ascribed to the British Caribbean community or the British Asian community, although it is also part of a more native British tradition - in dialects in the West Country and Wales, for instance — which might explain why it appears to have spread so rapidly among young speakers everywhere.
Original influences from overseas
The English Language can be traced back to the mixture of Anglo-Saxon dialects that came to these shores 1500 years ago. Since then it has been played with, altered and transported around the world in many different forms. The language we now recognise as English first became the dominant language in Great Britain during the Middle Ages, and in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From there it has been exported in the mouths of colonists and settlers to all four corners of the globe. ‘International English’, ‘World English’ or ‘Global English’ are terms used to describe a type of ‘General English’ that has, over the course of the twentieth century, become a worldwide means of communication.
American English
The first permanent English-speaking colony was established in North America in the early 1600s. The Americans soon developed a form of English that differed in a number of ways from the language spoken back in The British Isles. In some cases older forms were retained — the way most Americans pronounce the sound after a vowel in words like start, north, nurse and letter is probably very similar to pronunciation in 17th century England. Similarly, the distinction between past tense got and past participle gotten still exists in American English but has been lost in most dialects of the UK.
But the Americans also invented many new words to describe landscapes, wildlife, vegetation, food and lifestyles. Different pronunciations of existing words emerged as new settlers arrived from various parts of the UK and established settlements scattered along the East Coast and further inland. After the USA achieved independence from Great Britain in 1776 any sense of who ‘owned’ and set the ‘correct rules’ for the English Language became increasingly blurred. Different forces operating in the UK and in the USA influenced the emerging concept of a Standard English. The differences are perhaps first officially promoted in the spelling conventions proposed by Noah Webster in The American Spelling Book (1786) and subsequently adopted in his later work, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Both of these publications were enormously successful and established spellings such as center and color and were therefore major steps towards scholarly acceptance that British English and American English were becoming distinct entities.
Influence of Empire
Meanwhile, elsewhere, the British Empire was expanding dramatically, and during the 1700s British English established footholds in parts of Africa, in India, Australia and New Zealand. The colonisation process in these countries varied. In Australia and New Zealand, European settlers quickly outnumbered the indigenous population and so English was established as the dominant language. In India and Africa, however, centuries of colonial rule saw English imposed as an administrative language, spoken as a mother tongue by colonial settlers from the UK, but in most cases as a second language by the local population.
English around the world
Like American English, English in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa has evolved such that they are distinct from British English. However, cultural and political ties have meant that until relatively recently British English has acted as the benchmark for representing ‘standardised’ English — spelling tends to adhere to British English conventions, for instance. Elsewhere in Africa and on the Indian subcontinent, English is still used as an official language in several countries, even though these countries are independent of British rule. However, English remains very much a second language for most people, used in administration, education and government and as a means of communicating between speakers of diverse languages. As with most of the Commonwealth, British English is the model on which, for instance, Indian English or Nigerian English is based. In the Caribbean and especially in Canada, however, historical links with the UK compete with geographical, cultural and economic ties with the USA, so that some aspects of the local varieties of English follow British norms and others reflect US usage.
An international language
English is also hugely important as an international language and plays an important part even in countries where the UK has historically had little influence. It is learnt as the principal foreign language in most schools in Western Europe. It is also an essential part of the curriculum in far-flung places like Japan and South Korea, and is increasingly seen as desirable by millions of speakers in China. Prior to WWII, most teaching of English as a foreign language used British English as its model, and textbooks and other educational resources were produced here in the UK for use overseas. This reflected the UK"s cultural dominance and its perceived ‘ownership’ of the English Language. Since 1945, however, the increasing economic power of the USA and its unrivalled influence in popular culture has meant that American English has become the reference point for learners of English in places like Japan and even to a certain extent in some European countries. British English remains the model in most Commonwealth countries where English is learnt as a second language. However, as the history of English has shown, this situation may not last indefinitely. The increasing commercial and economic power of countries like India, for instance, might mean that Indian English will one day begin to have an impact beyond its own borders.
The worldwide effort to combat critical levels of biodiversity loss will fail without far greater involvement from local communities, according to an international declaration. (lines 1, 2)
Oil is the largest source of liquid fuel and, in spite of attempts to develop synthetic fuels, world consumption of oil products in increasing.
The oil industry is not much more than a hundred years old. It began when the first oil well was drilled in 1859. In the early days, oil was used to light houses because there was no electricity and gas was very scarce. Later, people began to use oil for heating too.
Most industries use machinery to make things. Every machine needs oil in order to run easily. Even a small clock or watch needs a little oil from time to time.
The engines of many machines use oil fuels petrol, kerosene or diesel. Cars, buses, trucks, tractors, and small aircraft use petroleum chemicals: synthetic rubber, plastics, synthetic fiber materials for clothes and for the home, paints, materials which help to stop rust, photographic materials, soap and cleaning materials (detergents), drugs, fertilizers for farms and gardens, food containers, and may others.
In 1900 the world’s oil production was less than 2 million tons a year. Today the oil industry is one of the world’s largest and most important suppliers of raw materials.
One of the big questions of today is whether global warming and climate change can be stopped or whether it is inevitable. Though worried, most scientists believe that if we act now, “serious” climate change and global warming can be avoided. A few, such as James Lovelock who created the GAIA theory of the Earth as a living organism, believes that is far too late to stop the changes that
are now unfolding. Politicians either deny that there is a problem or act as if there is plenty of time to do something. After weighing the arguments we in The GAIA-Movement have had to conclude the following:
• Global Warming and Climate Change are unavoidable as they are already going on and have been so for quite some time;
• they constitute an inevitable catastrophe that will unfold in the years and decades to come;
• this fact cannot be reversed as the politicians in power will not provide the leadership needed to implement the monumental changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emission and
• the processes set in motion are of such magnitude that they by now can only be postponed or prolonged so as to allow more time for adaptation.
We have reached our conclusions on global warming, climate change and the consequences thereof for food production and a number of other issues after studying books, films, websites, radio interviews, scientific magazines and reports.
The information we have found points in a clear direction and has thus enabled us to make a clear conclusion.
A basic book has been “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas, a journalist who has studied many scientific reports and from that has been able to describe what may happen to the Earth as it warms 1-2-3-4-5 and even 6 degrees.
Elizabeth Kolbert has written “Field Notes from a Catastrophe”. She has met many scientists working on global warming and the book has much dramatic information.
Several other authors have written books that give many details on global warming and climate change such as “The Last Generation” by Fred Pierce, “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery,“A Rough Guide to Climate Change” by Robert Henson, “The Revenge of GAIA” by James Lovelock and “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort to inform about climate change. The last book is also on film and there are several other films that tell about different aspects of climate change and what can be done to build a world on renewable energy.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN working group, which also received the Nobel Peace Prize made their latest report in 2007. We have studied the report which presents several models for how the climate may change during the next 100 years.
Text taken from the Gaia Movement: http://www.gaia-movement.org/
On: 10/23/2009
“Gaia” is the name of a Greek goddess of Earth.
