No trecho “The government has fined illegal cattle ranchers and loggers, while the food industries have banned products from illegally deforested areas, such as soya beans and beef.” (linhas 20-21), podemos afirmar que o tempo verbal utilizado é:

TEXT

[1]   The head of Brazil’s Senate, Renan  

Calheiros, has been accused of tax evasion,  

using a government jet to visit a surgeon who  

alleviated his baldness with hair implants and  

[5] allowing a construction company’s lobbyist to  

pay child support for his daughter from an  

extramarital affair with a television journalist. 

  Eduardo Cunha, the conservative  

speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress,  

[10] has also faced — and successfully battled — a  

list of corruption accusations, from  

embezzlement to living in an apartment paid  

for by a black-market money dealer. 

  In some democracies, figures facing such  

[15] situations might find themselves banished from  

public life even if they were never convicted.  

But not in Brazil, where the men who command  

the scandal-plagued Congress are actually 

increasing their power over the scandal

[20] plagued president, Dilma Rousseff.

  The move reflects one of the most  

profound shifts in political power in the country  

in decades — and is a clear measure of the  

troubles Ms. Rousseff now faces in the wake of  

[25] a sweeping bribery case involving Brazil’s  

national oil company. 

  “This is ‘House of Cards,’ Brazilian style,  

with the chiefs in Congress seizing a moment  

when the president is very weak,” said David  

[30] Fleischer, a professor emeritus of political  

science at the University of Brasília. “They are  

putting into motion a strategy of simply letting  

Dilma dangle in the wind,” he added. 

  The strategy seems to be working. While  

[35] both Mr. Cunha and Mr. Calheiros are on the  

list of dozens of political figures under  

investigation in connection with the bribery  

scandal, the congressional leaders appear to be  

deflecting attention from their own troubles by  

[40] revolting against Ms. Rousseff, whose public  

approval rating stands at a dismal 13 percent. 

  In doing so, they have managed to  

largely shield the Brazilian Congress from  

blame. Its own bleak approval rating climbed  

[45] to 11 percent in April from 9 percent in March,  

according to Datafolha, a prominent Brazilian  

polling company. The survey, conducted  

through interviews with 2,834 people, has a  

margin of sampling error of plus or minus two  

[50] percentage points. 

  Ms. Rousseff, who narrowly won re

election in October, is facing huge protests 

calling for her impeachment, with many  

Brazilians fuming over the sluggish economy  

[55] and revelations of the broad bribery scheme at  

the national oil company, Petrobras. She was  

chairwoman of the board at the state-

controlled oil giant from 2003 to 2010, roughly 

corresponding to the period when the scheme  

[60] was started. 

  The scandal involved executives at  

Petrobras accepting vast amounts of bribes,  

enriching themselves while also channeling  

funds to political figures and to Ms. Rousseff’s  

[65] leftist Workers Party, according to testimony by  

former executives. 

  No testimony has emerged indicating  

that Ms. Rousseff personally profited from the  

scheme. But at the same time, Ms. Rousseff  

[70] has been put on the defensive, insisting that  

bribery proceeds were not channeled to her  

election campaign. The scandal moved closer  

to the president after the arrest of the  

treasurer of her party, João Vaccari Neto. 

[75]   As Ms. Rousseff and her party reel from  

the scandal, she is facing a rebellion from the  

centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party,  

which has anchored her coalition and controls  

both houses of Congress. 

[80]   Both Mr. Calheiros, the Senate leader,  

and Mr. Cunha, the speaker of the lower house,  

are members of the rebelling party. Ms.  

Rousseff’s own vice president, Michel Temer, is  

the leader of the PMDB, as the party is known,  

[85] and Mr. Temer is bolstering his own power  

after the president appealed to him to ease  

tensions with Congress. 

  At each turn in the bribery scandal, the  

PMDB’s chiefs have moved to erode the power  

[90] of the left-leaning Ms. Rousseff, stalling some  

of the austerity measures proposed by her  

finance minister; thwarting the president’s  

nominees for her cabinet; and advancing  

socially conservative measures aimed at  

[95] weakening gun-control laws and repealing  

legislation keeping teenagers from being tried  

as adults. 

  Cristovam Buarque, a respected senator  

on the left who voted against Ms. Rousseff in  

[100] the recent election, said the growing sway over  

the president by the troika formed by the  

heads of Congress and the vice president  

amounted to a “coup.” 

  “Instead of a general, a brigadier and an  

[105] admiral acting with the support of the armed  

forces, we have the vice president of the  

republic and the chiefs of Congress  

maneuvering with the support of the troops of  

the PMDB,” Mr. Buarque said. 

[110]   Congress’s growing resistance represents  

a turning point for an institution that has been  

widely despised in Brazil for its propensity to  

reward itself with pay raises when other parts  

of society endure austerity measures, and for  

[115] its capacity to shield its members facing legal  

challenges. 

  Nearly 40 percent of federal legislators  

who won large numbers of votes in the 2014  

elections are under investigation in an array of  

[120] crimes, including illegal 0deforestation,  

embezzlement and torture. It takes a great  

deal for any member to be expelled from  

Congress. One example: Hildebrando Pascoal,  

a legislator convicted of operating a death  

[125] squad whose victims were dismembered with  

chain saws. 

  Few federal legislators ever face  

imprisonment for any crimes because of the  

special judicial standing enjoyed by all 594  

[130] members of Congress allowing them to be tried  

only in Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal,  

effectively producing years of delays in a court  

overwhelmed with examining many other  

pressing issues in Brazilian society. 

[135]   After facing scandals in the past, the  

figures now at the helm of Congress have  

shown an exceptional ability to withstand the  

allegations and resurrect their fortunes. Both  

Mr. Calheiros, the head of the Senate, and Mr.  

[140] Cunha, the head of the lower house, have  

asserted that they are innocent in connection  

to the bribery scheme at Petrobras. 

From: http://www.nytimes.com April 27, 2015 

In the sentence “Both Mr. Calheiros, the head of the Senate, and Mr. Cunha, the head of the lower house, have asserted that they are innocent in connection to the bribery scheme at Petrobras” (lines 138-142), the verbs in the clauses are respectively in the

T E X T  

  SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. 

  This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

  They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. 

  Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle MartinRhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. 

  In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task. 

  The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving. 

  Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page. 

  The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of PompeuFabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. 

  The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). 

  In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not. 

  Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset. 

  Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Source: www.nytimes.com

The verbs of the sentences “In the first task, the children sorted the shapes by color.”, “…since studies have shown that bilinguals…” and “Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition?” are respectively in the