Texto 7

AM I ALL RIGHT? 

  While John Gilbert was in hospital, he asked his doctor to tell him whether his operation had been successful, but the doctor refused to do so. The following day, the patient asked for a bedside telephone. When he was alone, he telephoned the hospital exchange and asked for Doctor Millington. When the doctor answered the phone, Mr. Gilbert said he was inquiring about a certain patient, a Mr. John Gilbert. He asked if Mr. Gilbert’s operation had been successful and the doctor told him that it had been. He then asked when Mr. Gilbert would be allowed to go home and the doctor told him that he would have to stay in hospital for another two weeks. Then Dr. Millington asked the caller if he was a relative of the patient. ‘No,’ the patient answered, ‘I am Mr. John Gilbert.’

ALEXANDER, L. G. Practice and progress. Longman. London, 1978. 

A synonym for the word “whether” (in the first line) can be  

TEXT

Pope Francis disappoints Rohingya by failing to condemn persecution

[1]   As the crowds trickled out of the  

Yangon sports ground where Pope Francis 

delivered his first public mass before tens of  

thousands of people, Khin Maung Myint, a  

[5] Rohingya activist, sat on the sidelines. He  

was disappointed. Not in Francis, but in the  

advisers who appear to have dissuaded the  

pontiff from bringing up the plight of the  

Rohingya people. “Rohingya are not the  

[10] ones who lost their dignity, but the people  

who silence the pope’s expression,” he said.  

“Those who pushed the pope not to use the  

word Rohingya, they are the ones who lost  

their dignity.” 

[15]   Francis is nearing the end of a  

four-day visit to Myanmar, previously  

known as Burma, in which he has not  

publicly spoken about the persecuted  

Muslim minority, more than 620,000 of  

[20] whom have fled to Bangladesh in recent  

months, escaping what western leaders are  

calling ethnic cleansing. 

  Among the guests in the VIP  

section, where a gazebo provided protection  

[25] from the hot Myanmar sun, was Aye Ne  

Win, the grandson of the country’s first  

dictator who attracted public derision  

recently after he dressed up as the pope for  

Halloween. Beside him, in a black veil, sat a  

[30] beauty queen who has described the  

Rohingya in a YouTube video as “harbingers  

of terror and violence”. 

  In his homily on Wednesday, the  

pope talked about the need for forgiveness  

[35] and ignoring the desire for revenge, but  

declined to reference violence meted out  

against the Rohingya, a campaign allegedly  

marked by gang-rape, massacres and  

arson. “We think that healing can come  

[40] from anger or revenge,” Francis said,  

speaking of the many “wounded” people in  

Myanmar. “Yet the way of revenge is not  

the way of Jesus,” he said. It was his  

second public address in Myanmar, coming  

[45] after he shared a stage with the state  

counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, on Tuesday,  

telling an audience of diplomats and  

journalists that all of Myanmar’s religious  

and minority ethnic groups – “none  

[50] excluded” – should be respected. 

  Both speeches have fallen short of  

what many expected from the pope, whose  

advocacy for refugees has been a  

benchmark of his papacy. He has previously  

[55] referred to “our Rohingya brothers and  

sisters”. At a press conference in Yangon on  

Wednesday night, papal spokesman Greg  

Burke said the moral authority of the Pope  

“still stands”. “You can criticize what is said  

[60] or not said but the Pope is not going to lose  

any moral authority on this question here,”  

he said.  

  The Rohingya have suffered  

decades of persecution in Myanmar, where  

[65] their freedoms have been slowly eroded and  

tens of thousands are confined to  

internment camps. They are widely deemed  

illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and  

labelled “Bengalis”. “For years the  

[70] international community has towed the  

government of Myanmar’s line, refusing to  

say ‘Rohingya’ for fear of doing harm,” said  

David Baulk, a Myanmar researcher for  

Fortify Rights. “There should be nothing  

[75] controversial about the pope identifying  

people by the name they want.” 

  Whether or not the pope should  

address the crisis has been a matter of  

debate within the Vatican since the visit was  

[80] announced, according to a source familiar  

with discussions. “There are probably a mix  

of voices in the Vatican,” they said. “Those  

who are old school diplomats for whom  

caution is always their watchword and  

[85] others who are a bit more bold.” 

  The most vocal was until recently  

Charles Maung Bo, Myanmar’s first cardinal,  

a powerful orator who has fiercely defended  

the Rohingya and condemned “merchants of  

[90] hatred” in the form of Buddhist  

ultranationalists who have sanctioned the  

violence. 

  Before this week’s visit he urged  

the pope not to use the word, though he  

[95] has made it clear he would have been  

happy with a compromise phrase, according  

to the source. “I think one factor in this was  

almost certainly pressure from within the  

church on him because he has been so  

[100] outspoken until now and I think there would  

have been an enormous amount of pressure  

from other bishops,” the source said. 

  Who are the Rohingya? 

  At the press conference on 

[105] Wednesday night, the split between the  

bishops was apparent, with one saying  

there was a lack of “reliable evidence” of  

atrocities and was not sure what was going  

on because he had not seen it himself. 

[110]   The silence is likely to appease  

many Catholics in the country who either  

share prejudices against the Rohingya or  

are afraid of a nationalist backlash against  

the 650,000-strong Catholic community in  

[115] Myanmar. 

  Francis is scheduled to fly to  

Dhaka in Bangladesh where he will meet  

Rohingya refugees on Thursday. But for  

some in Myanmar, the leader of the church  

[120] has a moral obligation not to leave the  

country without commenting on its most  

pressing crisis. 

  After the mass, Father Thomas, a  

Yangon priest, said he hoped the pope  

[125] brought the matter up in closed-door  

meetings this week with the army chief, Min  

Aung Hlaing, and Aung San Suu Kyi. 

  “This is the main issue in Burma,”  

he said. 

www.theguardian.com/nov.27.2017

The sentence “We think that healing can come from anger or revenge” (lines 39-40) has a(n)

Text

President Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima, Japan

[1]   Seventy-one years ago, on a bright  

cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and  

the world was changed. A flash of light and a  

wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated  

[5] that mankind possessed the means to destroy  

itself. 

  It is not the fact of war that sets  

Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent  

conflict appeared with the very first man. Our  

[10] early ancestors having learned to make blades  

from flint and spears from wood used these  

tools not just for hunting but against their  

own kind. On every continent, the history of  

civilization is filled with war, whether driven  

[15] by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, comp

elled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. 

Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have  

been subjugated and liberated. And at each  

juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless  

[20] toll, their names forgotten by time. 

  The world war that reached its brutal  

end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought  

among the wealthiest and most powerful of  

nations. Their civilizations had given the world  

[25] great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers  

had advanced ideas of justice and harmony  

and truth. And yet the war grew out of the  

same base instinct for domination or conquest  

that had caused conflicts among the simplest  

[30] tribes, an old pattern amplified by new  

capabilities and without new constraints. 

  In the image of a mushroom cloud that  

rose into these skies, we are most starkly 

reminded of humanity’s core contradiction.  

[35] How the very spark that marks us as a  

species, our thoughts, our imagination, our  

language, our toolmaking, our ability to set  

ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our  

will — those very things also give us the  

[40] capacity for unmatched destruction. 

  How often does material advancement  

or social innovation blind us to this truth? How  

easily we learn to justify violence in the name  

of some higher cause. 

[45]   Every great religion promises a pathway  

to love and peace and righteousness, and yet  

no religion has been spared from believers  

who have claimed their faith as a license to  

kill. 

[50]   Nations arise telling a story that binds  

people together in sacrifice and cooperation,  

allowing for remarkable feats. But those same  

stories have so often been used to oppress  

and dehumanize those who are different. 

[55]   Science allows us to communicate  

across the seas and fly above the clouds, to  

cure disease and understand the cosmos, but  

those same discoveries can be turned into  

ever more efficient killing machines. 

[60]   The wars of the modern age teach us  

this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth.  

Technological progress without an equivalent  

progress in human institutions can doom us.  

The scientific revolution that led to the  

[65] splitting of an atom requires a moral  

revolution as well. 

  Mere words cannot give voice to such  

suffering. But we have a shared responsibility  

to look directly into the eye of history and ask  

[70] what we must do differently to curb such  

suffering again. 

  Since that fateful day, we have made  

choices that give us hope. The United States  

and Japan have forged not only an alliance but  

[75] a friendship that has won far more for our  

people than we could ever claim through war.  

The nations of Europe built a union that  

replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce  

and democracy. Oppressed people and nations  

[80] won liberation. An international community  

established institutions and treaties that work  

to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll  

back and ultimately eliminate the existence of  

nuclear weapons. 

[85]   Still, every act of aggression between  

nations, every act of terror and corruption and  

cruelty and oppression that we see around the  

world shows our work is never done. We may  

not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do  

[90] evil, so nations and the alliances that we form

must possess the means to defend ourselves.

But among those nations like my own that

hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the

courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue

[95] a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my

lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the

possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a

course that leads to the destruction of these

[100] stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new

nations and secure deadly materials from

fanatics.

And yet that is not enough. For we see

around the world today how even the crudest

[105] rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence

on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset

about war itself. To prevent conflict

through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts

after they’ve begun. To see our growing

[110] interdependence as a cause for peaceful

cooperation and not violent competition. To

define our nations not by our capacity to

destroy but by what we build. And perhaps,

above all, we must reimagine our connection

[115] to one another as members of one human

race.

For this, too, is what makes our species

unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to

repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn.

[120] We can choose. We can tell our children a

TEXT 

  BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations. 

  In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug. 

  In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.” 

  “I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.” 

  His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination. 

  The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education. 

  In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway as chief justice and president of the panel overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize same-sex marriage across the country. And in an anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast vote-buying scheme.

  Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less pushing the institution to assert its independence, long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked as a bricklayer. 

  But his prominence — not just on the court, but in the streets as well — is so well established that masks with his face were sold for Carnival, amateur musicians have composed songs about his handling of the corruption trial and posted them on YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top choices for president in next year’s elections. 

  While the protests have subsided since their height in June, the political tumult they set off persists. The race for president, once considered a shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so much in the public eye that gossip columnists are following his romance with a woman in her 20s — repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a candidate for anything,” he says. 

  But the same public glare that has turned him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While he has won widespread admiration for his guidance of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every other prominent political figure in Brazil, has recently come under scrutiny. And for someone accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on the defensive. 

  One report in the Brazilian news media described how he received about $180,000 in payments for untaken leaves of absence during his 19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an apartment in Miami through a limited liability company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends that he has done nothing wrong.

  In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance. 

  As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea.  

  Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris. 

  Fascinated by the legal systems of other countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative action in the United States. He still voices his admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice in the United States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high court toward socially liberal rulings. 

  Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling of the trial of political operatives, legislators and bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly allowance, after the regular payments made to lawmakers in exchange for their votes. 

  Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the high court sentenced some of the most powerful figures in the governing Workers Party to years in prison for their crimes in the scheme, including bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political system in which impunity for politicians has been the norm. 

  Now the mensalão trial is entering what could be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times been visibly exasperated that defendants who have already been found guilty and sentenced have managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed with other justices over their consideration of a rare legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at the high court are examined. 

  Losing his patience with one prominent justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by using legalese to prop up certain positions. An outcry ensued among some who could not stomach Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that. “Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?” asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was qualified to preside over the court. “What powers does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal Tribunal?”

  Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the interview, he said some tension was necessary for the court to function properly. “It was always like this,” he said, contending that arguments are now just easier to see because the court’s proceedings are televised. 

  Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed with the violence of some demonstrators, but he also said he believed that the street movements were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.” 

   “People don’t want to passively stand by and observe these arrangements of the elite, which were always the Brazilian tradition,” he said. 

In the sentences “He still voices his admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice in the United States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years embodied the court’s liberal vision,” “he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki,” and “But the same public glare that has turned him into a celebrity has singed him as well,” the relative clauses in each one are, respectively, classified as 

TEXT

The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path. 

Going back to school for months or years is not realistic for many workers, who are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence. In their quest to occupy a useful niche, they are turning to bite-size instructional videos, peer-to-peer forums and virtual college courses. 

Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at the London Business School, has coined a term for this necessity: “serial mastery.” 

“You can’t expect that what you’ve become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s,” she said, adding that workers must try to choose specialties that cannot be outsourced or automated. “Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.” 

Businesses have responded by pouring more money into training, even in the current economic doldrums, according to several measures. They have experimented by paying employees to share their expertise in internal social networks, creating video games that teach and, human resources consultants say, enticing employees with tuition help even if they leave the company. 

Individuals have also shouldered a lot of responsibility for their own upgrades. Lynda.com, which charges $25 a month for access to training videos on topics like the latest version of Photoshop, says its base of individual customers has been growing 42 percent a year since 2008. Online universities like Udacity and Coursera are on pace to double in size in a year, according to Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in learning and talent management. The number of doctors participating in continuing education programs has more than doubled in the last decade, with the vast majority of the growth stemming from the increased popularity of Internet-based activities, according to the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education in Chicago. 

The struggle is not just to keep up, but to anticipate a future of rapid change. When the AshevilleBuncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina wanted to start a program for developing smartphone and tablet apps, the faculty had to consider the name carefully. “We had this title Mobile Applications, and then we realized that it may not be apps in two years, it may be something else,” said Pamela Silvers, the chairwoman of the business computer technologies department. “So we changed it to Mobile Development.” 

As the metadata and digital archivist at Emory University, Elizabeth Russey Roke, 35, has had to keep up with evolving standards that help different databases share information, learn how to archive “born digital” materials, and use computers to bring literary and social connections among different collections to life. The bulk of her learning has been on the job, supplemented by the occasional course or videos on Lynda.com. 

“For me, it’s easier to learn something in the classroom than it is on my own,” she said. “But I can’t exactly afford another three years of library school.” 

Rapid change is a challenge for traditional universities; textbooks and even journals often lag too far behind the curve to be of help, said Kunal Mehta, a Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Stanford University. His field is so new, and changing so rapidly, he said, that there is little consensus on established practices or necessary skills. “It’s more difficult to know what we should learn,” he said. “We have advisers that we work with, but a lot of times they don’t know any better than us what’s going to happen in the future.”  

Instead, Mr. Mehta, 26, spends a lot of time comparing notes with others in his field, just as many professionals turn to their peers to help them stay current. The International Automotive Technicians Network, where mechanics pay $15 a month to trade tips on repairs, has more than 75,000 active users today, up from 48,000 in 2006, said Scott Brown, the president.  

In an economy where new, specialized knowledge is worth so much, it may seem anticompetitive to share expertise. But many professionals say they don’t see it that way. 

“We’re scattered all over the country, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., so it never really bothered us that we were sharing the secrets of what we do,” said Bill Moss, whose repair shop in Warrenton, Va., specializes in European cars, and who is a frequent user of peer-to-peer forums. 

Mr. Moss, 55, said technological advances and proprietary diagnostic tools had forced many garages to specialize. Ten years ago, if his business had hit a slow patch, he said, he would have been quicker to broaden his repertory. “I might have looked at other brands and said, ‘These cars aren’t so bad.’ That’s much harder to do now, based on technology and equipment requirements.” His training budget is about $4,000 a year for each repair technician. 

Learning curves are not always driven by technology. Managers have to deal with different cultures, different time zones and different generations as well as changing attitudes. As medical director of the Reproductive Science Center of New England, Dr. Samuel C. Pang has used patient focus groups and sensitivity training to help the staff adjust to treating lesbian couples, gay male couples, and transgendered couples who want to have children. This has given the clinic a competitive advantage. 

“We have had several male couples and lesbian couples come to our program from our competitors’ program because they said they didn’t feel comfortable there,” Dr. Pang said.

On top of that, he has to master constantly evolving technology. “The amount of information that I learned in medical school is minuscule,” he said, “compared to what is out there now.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22 

In the sentences “The amount of information that I learned in medical school is minuscule,” and “Bersin & Associates is a consulting firm that specializes in learning and talent management.”, the parts in italics are, respectively, a