Questões de Inglês - Grammar

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 underlined verbs in “...previously known as Burma” (lines 16-17) and “...had not seen it himself... (line 109) are respectively in the

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 

The sentences “Textbooks and even journals often lag too far behind the curve...” and “… technological advances and proprietary diagnostic tools had forced many garages to specialize.” are, respectively, in the 

T E X T  

  Language is forever changing – and forms such as tweets and text messages are no less valid than any textbook version, says the linguist David Crystal, whose latest book encourages children to engage with the possibilities of their lingua franca.

  Were the English language ever to need an official guardian, Professor David Crystal certainly looks the part. But the professor would, I suspect, quickly shrug off such a custodial title – not out of modesty, but principle. Though many endangered languages need their champions, he would say, English does not require a guardian; it is vibrant and evolving and can fend for itself. 

  Crystal’s A Little Book of Language is the latest work of a prolific career. He already has more than 100 books to his name; some are academic but many are for the general inquisitive reader, including By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English and Shakespeare's Words, which was co-authored by his son, Ben.

  For the Crystals, linguistics is clearly a family affair. In the jaunty early chapters of A Little Book of Language, Crystal notes how, when his four children were young, he would study them."We're talking the 1960s, when the study of linguistics had hardly begun – people did not know, in a scientific way, how you developed language," he recalls. "Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time." 

  Something must have rubbed off. Though his elder two children, Steven and Sue, eschewed academia, his daughter Lucy took up copywriting and his son Ben, an actor, is now following his father. "His book Shakespeare on Toast was a runaway hit – I wish I'd written it!" says Crystal, before rapidly, and self-effacingly, adding: "But I couldn't have – because it was so cool and modern and so street in its approach to Shakespeare. He has examples of hip-hop Shakespearians and I would never have dared put any of that stuff into one of my books." 

  A Little Book of Language is a simple history of all language, taking in phonetics, development, social uses, the internet, endangered languages and a touch of literature.

  This all sounds very innocent, but books for children can be a contentious issue. Language, as much as history, is part of a national identity and cannot escape contemporary debates. And since Crystal began his academic career in the early 1960s, there have been dramatic shifts in how the English language is taught. "The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior," he says. "Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now." 

  What has replaced it is something far more fluid – descriptive rather than prescriptive, as the terminology goes. In schools, appropriateness has replaced the principle of correctness. "Now, one looks at all varieties of language and asks why they are used, says Crystal. "We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there." 

  This doesn't sit easy with the traditionalists, of whom there are still many. His clearest example is the belief that text messaging is destroying children's ability to spell. "It's all nonsense, but people believe it." 

  He addressed this in his book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, published three years ago, in which he found that "txt speak" accounted for barely 10 per cent of the contents of the messages exchanged, and noted that abbreviations have always been part of the English language. Having solved that argument with some decent data, he tells me that he's now moving on to Twitter. 

  "On Twitter [which limits each written entry to 140 characters], you don't get the range of texting abbreviations you get in text messaging. It's a more sophisticated kind of communicative medium. You get semantic threads running through it. When you start counting thousands and thousands of messages, you suddenly realise that on the whole it's a new art form in the making." 

  The breadth of the internet means that language is morphing not just on grocers' signs and in school playgrounds, but on a far more fundamental level. 

  "All these different genres – instant messaging, blogging, chatrooms, virtual worlds – have evolved different sets of communicative strategies, which means that you can look at the language and say, 'That must be an example of a chatroom, that must be an example of a tweet,' and you can predict it." 

  Becoming involved in bigger arguments seems to be an occupational hazard for a linguist. Whether it be education, politics or neuroscience, we all have a vested interest in the implications of language. Our conversation turns to the recent news of a man who had been lying in a vegetative state for seven years before doctors managed to establish basic communication by scanning his brainwaves. "We are moving fast in a direction where you will be able to see what people are saying," says Crystal, optimistically. "We've got to the stage where you can see the complexity of language processing. We're not at the stage yet of being able to see clearly individual sentence patterns and words, but it's not long off." 

  Surely this has huge implications, not least for personal liberties? "It is the case that virtually every language issue resolves into a social or political or psychological issue," Crystal reminds me. "Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like. At which point, you know that a linguist has to bow out and say, 'This is bigger than me.'" 

By Joy Lo Dico 14 March 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk 

In terms of verb tense, the sentences “…abbreviations have always been part of the English language.” “…the recent news of a man who had been lying in a vegetative state for seven years…” and “…the 1960s, when the study of linguistics had hardly begun…”may be classified respectively as