Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Minority ethnic Britons face ‘shocking’ job discrimination
Haroon Siddique
Thu 17 Jan 2019 17.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 18 Jan 2019 00.50 GMT

A study by experts based at the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, found applicants from minority ethnic backgrounds had to send 80% more applications to get a positive response from an employer than a white person of British origin.

A linked study by the same researchers, comparing their results with similar field experiments dating back to 1969, found discrimination against black Britons and those of south Asian origin – particularly Pakistanis – unchanged over almost 50 years.

The research, part of a larger cross-national project funded by the European Union and shared exclusively with the Guardian before its official launch, prompted concerns that race relations legislation had failed.

It echoes findings published as part of the Guardian’s Bias in Britain series that people from minority ethnic backgrounds face discrimination when seeking a room to rent. In a snapshot survey of online flatshare ads the Guardian found that an applicant called Muhammad was significantly less likely to receive a positive response than an applicant called David.

Prof Anthony Heath, co-author and emeritus fellow of Nuffield College, said: “The absence of any real decline in discrimination against black British and people of Pakistani background is a disturbing finding, which calls into question the effectiveness of previous policies. Ethnic inequality remains a burning injustice and there needs to be a radical rethink about how to tackle it.”

Dr Zubaida Haque, the deputy director of the race equality thinktank Runnymede, described the findings as shocking. They demonstrated that “it’s not just covert racism or unconscious bias that we need to worry about; it’s overt and conscious racism, where applicants are getting shortlisted on the basis of their ethnicity and/or name”, she said.

“It’s clear that race relations legislation is not sufficient to hold employers to account. There are no real consequences for employers of racially discriminating in subtle ways, but for BME* applicants or employees it means higher unemployment, lower wages, poorer conditions and less security in work and life.”

https://tinyurl.com/y9nohdte Acesso em: 07.10.2019. Adaptado.

*BME – Black and Minority Ethnicity

HOW MUSIC STREAMING SERVICES ARE TAPPING INTO THE AI VIBE

Rajasimha Koppula

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the design, implementation and use of programs, machines, and systems that exhibit human intelligence. Furthermore, with its most important activities being knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning, AI encompasses a number of important sub- -areas, which include: voice recognition, image identification, natural language processing, expert systems, neural networks, planning, robotics, and intelligent agents. According to a McKinsey & Company study, in 2016, companies invested $26 to $39 billion in AI. In addition, since 2013, investments have increased by three times.

An overview of the music streaming industry

In 1999, the music industry market size was less than half of today. What provoked this growth, you ask? The answer is simple: the internet. The technological advancements of the internet grew at a rate of 200% around the globe between 2000–2018, taking the music industry to new heights.

According to the Financial Times, the internet played a catalyst role in online music streaming industry growth. Major music service providers, such as Spotify, Apple, Pandora, and Amazon are taking music services to the next level by integrating AI with their music streaming platforms.

Today,music streamingservicesarehelpingusersbyutilizing technology to understand customers’ tastes by using AI and recommending more comparable songs on a timely basis.

Traditionally, any business owner utilizes data analytic tools to diagnose, group, predict, and understand customer requirements to make an appropriate business change/service recommendation. For the music industry, due to the rapidly growing number of customers, and the wide variety of choices now available, traditional tools don’t cut it anymore. Incorporating AI and machine learning technologies into music streaming algorithms is quickly becoming the new norm. If a music service provider can’t ‘guess’ what a user wants to hear, the user will most likely switch to one that can.

From: <https://www.prescouter.com/2018/03/music-streaming-services-ai/>

Glossary: Tapping into:tirandoproveitode; encompasses:abrange; networks: redes; rate: taxa; heights: alturas; owner: dono; proprietário;requirements:exigências;guess:adivinhar; switch:trocar,mudar.

    If the economy of the nineteenth-century world was
formed mainly under the influence of the British Industrial
Revolution, its politics and ideology were formed mainly
by the French. Britain provided the model for its railways
[5] and factories, the economic explosive which cracked open
the traditional economic and social structures of the
non-European world; but France made its revolutions and
gave them their ideas, to the point where a tricolour flag of
some kind became the emblem of virtually every emerging
[10] nation, and European (or indeed world) politics between
1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against
the principles of 1789.
    France provided the vocabulary and the issues of
liberal and radical-democratic politics for most of the
[15] world. France provided the first great example, the concept
and the vocabulary of nationalism. France provided the
codes of law, the model of scientific and technical
organization, the metric system of measurement for most
countries. The ideology of the modern world first
[20] penetrated the ancient civilizations which had until then
resisted European ideas through French influence. This
was the work of the French Revolution.

Eric Hobsbawm. The age of revolution: 1789-1848. Abacus: London, 2007, p. 73-4 (adapted).

Judge the following based on the text above