Questões de Inglês

RELIGION AND GENTRIFICATION [Revitalização Urbana]

    When Lincoln Temple, a church in the Shaw neighbourhood of Washington, DC, closed this year, it signalled the end of an important chapter in AfricanAmerican history. Founded in 1869 by a group that included many newly freed slaves, it became a hub [eixo] of the civil-rights movement. In the 1950s one of its earliest members, Mary Church Terrell, led successful sit-in protests against Washington’s segregated restaurants. In the next decade the church was used as a marshalling ground for marches. It attracted famous preachers. Roberta Flack sang there. More than a thousand people once attended Lincoln Temple´s Sunday services.

    By 2018, after decades of steady decline, that number had dwindled to a dozen – if the pastor was lucky. In September the redbrick Romanesque Revival church, erected in 1928 to replace an older building, held its last service. Lincoln Temple, part of the United Church of Christ, is not unique. According to Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Christian non-profit that uses city data to count church closures, Shaw has lost around 30% of its churches – most of them with predominantly black congregations – since 2008. In Capitol Hill it reckons over 40% of religious properties have closed

    One of the reasons behind the disappearance of Washington’s churches is familiar across the West: fewer people are going to church. But as in other big cities, that change has been exacerbated by the departure of African-American to the suburbs. What began in part as a search for more space and a better life has been accelerated by gentrification.

    In 2015 the proportion of black residents in Washington dropped below 50% of the population for the first time in decades. Many of those who left took their religion with them, as the proliferation of churches in some Maryland suburbs shows. Some tried not to. Jeanne Cooper, who attended Lincoln Temple for five decades, says many congregants would drive in from the suburbs on Sunday; she did so herself until the church´s last service. But as parking spaces were swallowed up by development, or claimed by new residents who had lobbied the city for parking restrictions, the journey became too much for many of its ageing members

    Elsewhere in Washington, old churches have been torn down or developed to make apartments blocks. Shaw, where Victorian row houses sit alongside renovated industrial lofts, has become one of the city´s trendiest neighbourhoods. Demand for land is high. But Mrs Cooper says the church´s management team, which she leads, hopes to continue renting out the building to groups that serve the area´s poor. “That way, it almost feels as if the church is returning to its original purpose,” she says.

Adapted from The Economist, December 22nd 2018 – January 4th 2019.

RELIGION AND GENTRIFICATION [Revitalização Urbana]

    When Lincoln Temple, a church in the Shaw neighbourhood of Washington, DC, closed this year, it signalled the end of an important chapter in AfricanAmerican history. Founded in 1869 by a group that included many newly freed slaves, it became a hub [eixo] of the civil-rights movement. In the 1950s one of its earliest members, Mary Church Terrell, led successful sit-in protests against Washington’s segregated restaurants. In the next decade the church was used as a marshalling ground for marches. It attracted famous preachers. Roberta Flack sang there. More than a thousand people once attended Lincoln Temple´s Sunday services.

    By 2018, after decades of steady decline, that number had dwindled to a dozen – if the pastor was lucky. In September the redbrick Romanesque Revival church, erected in 1928 to replace an older building, held its last service. Lincoln Temple, part of the United Church of Christ, is not unique. According to Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Christian non-profit that uses city data to count church closures, Shaw has lost around 30% of its churches – most of them with predominantly black congregations – since 2008. In Capitol Hill it reckons over 40% of religious properties have closed

    One of the reasons behind the disappearance of Washington’s churches is familiar across the West: fewer people are going to church. But as in other big cities, that change has been exacerbated by the departure of African-American to the suburbs. What began in part as a search for more space and a better life has been accelerated by gentrification.

    In 2015 the proportion of black residents in Washington dropped below 50% of the population for the first time in decades. Many of those who left took their religion with them, as the proliferation of churches in some Maryland suburbs shows. Some tried not to. Jeanne Cooper, who attended Lincoln Temple for five decades, says many congregants would drive in from the suburbs on Sunday; she did so herself until the church´s last service. But as parking spaces were swallowed up by development, or claimed by new residents who had lobbied the city for parking restrictions, the journey became too much for many of its ageing members

    Elsewhere in Washington, old churches have been torn down or developed to make apartments blocks. Shaw, where Victorian row houses sit alongside renovated industrial lofts, has become one of the city´s trendiest neighbourhoods. Demand for land is high. But Mrs Cooper says the church´s management team, which she leads, hopes to continue renting out the building to groups that serve the area´s poor. “That way, it almost feels as if the church is returning to its original purpose,” she says.

Adapted from The Economist, December 22nd 2018 – January 4th 2019.

Read the text to answer question.

    There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last halfcentury, America has lost something — the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.

    At one level, this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. Months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.” So, here, lessons the Apollo has left behind.

    1.                        President John Kennedy simplified NASA’s job with his 1961 address to Congress committing to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” From then on, any decision was made by whether it would aid or impede the agency in meeting that deadline. Experiments that were too heavy were shelved, however valuable they might have been. Technologies that were superior but not ready for deployment were set aside. Having a North Star to pursue was essential, because skeptics and critics abounded. Amid protests over the Vietnam war and race riots, NASA engineers kept their heads down and their slide rules busy.

    2. Harness incongruence. In any large organization there is pressure to suppress dissent. That can be deadly, as it was for NASA in the two space shuttle failures — Challenger and Columbia — each of which killed all seven crew members. Leading up to both tragedies, the fact that engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case; and were consequently ignored.

    After the bad years of the shuttle disasters, the practice of harnessing incongruence, and learning from mistakes, has staged something of a revival at NASA, which has since successfully sent unmanned craft to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Says Adam Stelzner, a NASA engineer, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them until the deepest truth presents itself”.

    3. Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors from the most varied places. NASA itself was, therefore, more of a confederation than a single agency.

    With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable. NASA Administrator James Webb coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were made by headquarters. Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts during a routine test in 1967 was traced to deficiencies Webb had been unaware of. Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.

    4. Effectiveness and elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mission was poor. The module that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize version of a kid’s cardboard science project, all right angles and skinny legs. Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome; what was, by plan, to be rescued from the Pacific Ocean was a stubby cone weighing just 0.2% of the majestic original. But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may appear elegant to an engineer. Engineering inelegance, by contrast, would be redesigning a machine without fully anticipating the consequences.

    Most of the people alive today had not yet arrived on the planet when Armstrong, Aldrin and Commander Michael Collins returned to it after their historic voyage. Never mind, though. The moon landing was a victory for all of the human race, past, present, and future.

(Peter Coy. Bloomberg Businessweek, 22.07.2019. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer question.

    There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last halfcentury, America has lost something — the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.

    At one level, this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. Months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.” So, here, lessons the Apollo has left behind.

    1.                        President John Kennedy simplified NASA’s job with his 1961 address to Congress committing to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” From then on, any decision was made by whether it would aid or impede the agency in meeting that deadline. Experiments that were too heavy were shelved, however valuable they might have been. Technologies that were superior but not ready for deployment were set aside. Having a North Star to pursue was essential, because skeptics and critics abounded. Amid protests over the Vietnam war and race riots, NASA engineers kept their heads down and their slide rules busy.

    2. Harness incongruence. In any large organization there is pressure to suppress dissent. That can be deadly, as it was for NASA in the two space shuttle failures — Challenger and Columbia — each of which killed all seven crew members. Leading up to both tragedies, the fact that engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case; and were consequently ignored.

    After the bad years of the shuttle disasters, the practice of harnessing incongruence, and learning from mistakes, has staged something of a revival at NASA, which has since successfully sent unmanned craft to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Says Adam Stelzner, a NASA engineer, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them until the deepest truth presents itself”.

    3. Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors from the most varied places. NASA itself was, therefore, more of a confederation than a single agency.

    With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable. NASA Administrator James Webb coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were made by headquarters. Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts during a routine test in 1967 was traced to deficiencies Webb had been unaware of. Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.

    4. Effectiveness and elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mission was poor. The module that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize version of a kid’s cardboard science project, all right angles and skinny legs. Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome; what was, by plan, to be rescued from the Pacific Ocean was a stubby cone weighing just 0.2% of the majestic original. But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may appear elegant to an engineer. Engineering inelegance, by contrast, would be redesigning a machine without fully anticipating the consequences.

    Most of the people alive today had not yet arrived on the planet when Armstrong, Aldrin and Commander Michael Collins returned to it after their historic voyage. Never mind, though. The moon landing was a victory for all of the human race, past, present, and future.

(Peter Coy. Bloomberg Businessweek, 22.07.2019. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer question.

    There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last halfcentury, America has lost something — the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.

    At one level, this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. Months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.” So, here, lessons the Apollo has left behind.

    1.                        President John Kennedy simplified NASA’s job with his 1961 address to Congress committing to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” From then on, any decision was made by whether it would aid or impede the agency in meeting that deadline. Experiments that were too heavy were shelved, however valuable they might have been. Technologies that were superior but not ready for deployment were set aside. Having a North Star to pursue was essential, because skeptics and critics abounded. Amid protests over the Vietnam war and race riots, NASA engineers kept their heads down and their slide rules busy.

    2. Harness incongruence. In any large organization there is pressure to suppress dissent. That can be deadly, as it was for NASA in the two space shuttle failures — Challenger and Columbia — each of which killed all seven crew members. Leading up to both tragedies, the fact that engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case; and were consequently ignored.

    After the bad years of the shuttle disasters, the practice of harnessing incongruence, and learning from mistakes, has staged something of a revival at NASA, which has since successfully sent unmanned craft to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Says Adam Stelzner, a NASA engineer, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them until the deepest truth presents itself”.

    3. Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors from the most varied places. NASA itself was, therefore, more of a confederation than a single agency.

    With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable. NASA Administrator James Webb coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were made by headquarters. Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts during a routine test in 1967 was traced to deficiencies Webb had been unaware of. Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.

    4. Effectiveness and elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mission was poor. The module that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize version of a kid’s cardboard science project, all right angles and skinny legs. Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome; what was, by plan, to be rescued from the Pacific Ocean was a stubby cone weighing just 0.2% of the majestic original. But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may appear elegant to an engineer. Engineering inelegance, by contrast, would be redesigning a machine without fully anticipating the consequences.

    Most of the people alive today had not yet arrived on the planet when Armstrong, Aldrin and Commander Michael Collins returned to it after their historic voyage. Never mind, though. The moon landing was a victory for all of the human race, past, present, and future.

(Peter Coy. Bloomberg Businessweek, 22.07.2019. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer question.

    There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last halfcentury, America has lost something — the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.

    At one level, this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. Months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.” So, here, lessons the Apollo has left behind.

    1.                        President John Kennedy simplified NASA’s job with his 1961 address to Congress committing to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” From then on, any decision was made by whether it would aid or impede the agency in meeting that deadline. Experiments that were too heavy were shelved, however valuable they might have been. Technologies that were superior but not ready for deployment were set aside. Having a North Star to pursue was essential, because skeptics and critics abounded. Amid protests over the Vietnam war and race riots, NASA engineers kept their heads down and their slide rules busy.

    2. Harness incongruence. In any large organization there is pressure to suppress dissent. That can be deadly, as it was for NASA in the two space shuttle failures — Challenger and Columbia — each of which killed all seven crew members. Leading up to both tragedies, the fact that engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case; and were consequently ignored.

    After the bad years of the shuttle disasters, the practice of harnessing incongruence, and learning from mistakes, has staged something of a revival at NASA, which has since successfully sent unmanned craft to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Says Adam Stelzner, a NASA engineer, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them until the deepest truth presents itself”.

    3. Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors from the most varied places. NASA itself was, therefore, more of a confederation than a single agency.

    With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable. NASA Administrator James Webb coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were made by headquarters. Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts during a routine test in 1967 was traced to deficiencies Webb had been unaware of. Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.

    4. Effectiveness and elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mission was poor. The module that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize version of a kid’s cardboard science project, all right angles and skinny legs. Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome; what was, by plan, to be rescued from the Pacific Ocean was a stubby cone weighing just 0.2% of the majestic original. But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may appear elegant to an engineer. Engineering inelegance, by contrast, would be redesigning a machine without fully anticipating the consequences.

    Most of the people alive today had not yet arrived on the planet when Armstrong, Aldrin and Commander Michael Collins returned to it after their historic voyage. Never mind, though. The moon landing was a victory for all of the human race, past, present, and future.

(Peter Coy. Bloomberg Businessweek, 22.07.2019. Adapted.)