Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.

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What do nationalists believe in? (Part III)

    Nationalists' primary belief is that people in similar societies benefit when they are united by shared values and a common belief system.

    "Uniting people -- whether under flags, banners, anthems, or constitutions -- is conducive to a more robust civic society and stronger communities," Kassam said.

    But Miller dismisses that as an "incoherent" ideology. "No one has ever been able to agree on what defines the nation. It is impractical because there is no feasible way to make governments overlap exactly with all the supposed nations in the world today," Miller said.

    Nationalists are also populists and consider themselves sticking up for the common, working man against the elites and so-called globalists. There are voters in both US political parties receptive to that kind of messaging, and that's why the fiery populist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Trump during the 2016 campaign ended up appealing to overlapping groups of voters.

    Nationalists are also extremely protectionist, preferring to look inward when it comes to matters of foreign affairs and trade. Trump's political positions have shifted all of his life, but the one constant has been his distrust of international trade agreements and his belief that they're ultimately bad for the United States.

    "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs," Trump said during his inaugural speech in January 2017. "Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength."

    This type of thinking is typical of nationalists.

From: shorturl.at/kmOR1 Accessed on 08/28/2019

Text

What do nationalists believe in? (Part III)

    Nationalists' primary belief is that people in similar societies benefit when they are united by shared values and a common belief system.

    "Uniting people -- whether under flags, banners, anthems, or constitutions -- is conducive to a more robust civic society and stronger communities," Kassam said.

    But Miller dismisses that as an "incoherent" ideology. "No one has ever been able to agree on what defines the nation. It is impractical because there is no feasible way to make governments overlap exactly with all the supposed nations in the world today," Miller said.

    Nationalists are also populists and consider themselves sticking up for the common, working man against the elites and so-called globalists. There are voters in both US political parties receptive to that kind of messaging, and that's why the fiery populist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Trump during the 2016 campaign ended up appealing to overlapping groups of voters.

    Nationalists are also extremely protectionist, preferring to look inward when it comes to matters of foreign affairs and trade. Trump's political positions have shifted all of his life, but the one constant has been his distrust of international trade agreements and his belief that they're ultimately bad for the United States.

    "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs," Trump said during his inaugural speech in January 2017. "Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength."

    This type of thinking is typical of nationalists.

From: shorturl.at/kmOR1 Accessed on 08/28/2019

O texto a seguir é referência para a questão.

More Than Just Children’s Books

Krumulus, a small bookstore in Germany, has everything a kid could want: parties, readings, concerts, plays, puppet shows, workshops and book clubs.

“I knew it was going to be very difficult to open a bookstore, everyone tells you you’re crazy, there will be no future,” says Anna Morlinghaus, Krumulus’s founder. Still, she wanted to try. A month before her third son was born, she opened the store in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.

BERLIN — On a recent Saturday afternoon, a hush fell in the bright, airy “reading-aloud” room at Krumulus, a small children’s bookstore in Berlin, as Sven Wallrodt, one of the store’s employees, stood up to speak. Brandishing a newly published illustrated children’s book about the life of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, he looked at the crowd of eager, mostly school-aged children and their parents. “Welcome to this book presentation”, he said. “If you fall asleep, snore quietly”. Everyone laughed, but no one fell asleep. An hour later, the children followed Wallrodt down to the bookstore’s basement workshop, where he showed them how Gutenberg fit leaden block letters into a metal plate. Then the children printed their own bookmark using a technique similar to Gutenberg’s, everyone was thrilled.

(Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/books/berlin-germany-krumulus.html)

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Words that define the present

  At a time when the world is changing more quickly than ever before, we need a new vocabulary to help us grasp what’s happening.

  Catfishing. This word would make more sense if it referred to fishing for cats, but in fact, it refers to people who construct false identities online. Whether out of boredom, loneliness or malice, they lure other people into continued messaging correspondence, thereby building false relationships with them (the apparent source of the term “catfish” is a 2010 documentary called Catfish, whose verity, ironically enough, has been questioned).

  There are two ways of looking at this: 1) The internet/ cyberspace is wonderful, because it gives people the freedom to augment or totally change their identities, and this is a marvellous new dawn for human expression, a new step in human evolution. 2) Nah, it’s a false dawn, because the internet is essentially a libertarian arena, and, as such, an amoral one (lots of “freedoms” but with no attendant social obligations); it is a new jungle where we must watch our backs and struggle for survival, surely a backward step in evolution. I lean toward the latter.

(Cameron Laux. www.bbc.com, 08.08.2018. Adaptado.)