Questões de Inglês - Grammar

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    Could adopting a new name improve your fortune? Some Chinese communities think so

    One afternoon in April, Mandy Pang’s worst fears came true. She was summoned onto a Zoom with her boss on short notice. Due to the economic downturn from the pandemic, she was being made redundant at her marketing job.

    Angry and hurt, the 29-year-old Hong Konger went back home and began brooding over memories from her previous jobs, and the “bad luck” that seemed to be holding her hostage. A month later, still looking for work, Pang decided she knew what she had to do: change her legal name in a bid to shake off her bad luck and improve her future prospects.

    She says, “My mother’s friend told me that the new name can help me fend off ‘petty people’” – those who have a negative influence over her life.

    In traditional Chinese culture, the meaning behind names has always carried huge importance. Chinese communities across East Asia believe a name can affect one’s luck in every aspect of their lives, from health and romance to finances and academic performance. As the pandemic continues to hit the economy hard, people like Pang who find themselves out of work are not only polishing their CVs, but also heading to fortune tellers for advice on whether a new name might change their futures.

    “Chinese people believe that there are 10 things that decide their destiny,” says Lee Shingchak, one of Hong Kong’s most well-known feng shui practitioners. “Other than one’s timing of birth or doing good deeds, one’s name is believed to be one of the factors in the equation.”

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[1]     It’s never too late to make changes to prevent diseases
that may end your flying career. And becoming healthier
doesn’t mean you have to make major changes. Here are
some tips on what you can do today to keep yourself in the
[5] air for years to come.
    - take the stairs instead of riding the elevator;
    - limit red meat;
    - consume more vegetables;
    - wear UV-blocking sunglasses;
[10]    - walk more;
    - try a yoga class;
    - don’t smoke;
    - drink a lot of water;
    - find an activity that you love after retirement.
Fonte:http://goo.gl/W3uCrU Acess 30/05/2017

Leia o trecho da notícia “Amazon fires: what is happening and is there anything we can do?” publicada no jornal The Guardian e responda às questões.

What is happening in the Amazon? Thousands of fires are burning in Brazil, many of them in the world’s biggest rainforest, which is sending clouds of smoke across the region and pumping alarming quantities of carbon into the world’s atmosphere.

Does this happen every year? Yes, but some areas have suffered far more than usual. In the worst-affected Brazilian state of Amazonas, the peak day this month was 700% higher than the average for the same date over the past 15 years. In other states, the amount of ash and other particulates in August has hit the highest level since 2010.

What is the cause? Most of the fires are agricultural, either smallholders burning stubble after harvest, or farmers clearing forest for cropland. Illegal land-grabbers also destroy trees so they can raise the value of the property they seize. But they are manmade and mostly deliberate. Unlike the huge recent blazes in Siberia and Alaska, the Amazon fires are very unlikely to have been caused by lightning.

Fonte: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/23/ amazon-fires-what-is-happening-anything-we-can-do. Acesso em: 24 set. de 2019.​​​​​​​

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How to fix inequality

Introduction

    In an age of widening inequality, the Stanford professor Walter Scheidel believes he has cracked the code on how to overcome it in his book “The Great Leveler”. The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked Mr Scheidel to reply to a number of questions.

    1. The Economist: Is society incapable of tackling income inequality peacefully?

    Walter Scheidel: No, but history shows that there are limits. There is a big difference between maintaining existing arrangements that successfully check inequality — Scandinavia is a good example — and significantly reducing it. The latter requires real change and that is always much harder to do: think of America or Britain, not to mention Brazil, China or India. The modern welfare state does a reasonably good job of compensating for inequality before taxes and transfers. However, for more substantial levelling to occur, the established order needs to be shaken up: the greater the shock to the system, the easier it becomes to reduce privilege at the top.

    2. The Economist: Are we really living in an implacable period of wealth inequality — or was the relatively equal society that followed the Second World War the real aberration?

    Walter Scheidel: When we view history over the long run, we can see that this experience was certainly a novelty. We now know that modernisation as such does not reliably reduce inequality. Many things had to come together to make this happen, such as very high income and estate taxes, strong labour unions, and intrusive regulations and controls. Since the 1980s, liberalisation and globalisation have allowed inequality to rise again. Even so, wealth concentration in Europe is nowhere near as high as it was a century ago. Like Europe, America, meanwhile, is getting there — which shows that it all depends on where you look.

    3. The Economist: How do artificial intelligence and automation fit in to your thinking? Will they be a calamity for employment and thus for equality? Or might they unleash extraordinary productivity and improvements in living standards that actually narrow inequality?

    Walter Scheidel: Ideally, we would like education to keep up with technological change to make sure workers have the skills they need to face this challenge. But in practice, there will always be losers, and even basic-income schemes can take us only so far. At the end of the day, someone owns the robots. As long as the capitalist world system is in place, it is hard to see how even huge productivity gains from greater automation would benefit society evenly instead of funnelling even more income and wealth to those who are in the best position to pocket these gains.

(The Economist. http://bit.do/eysic. Adaptado)