Questões de Inglês

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Olympics, smartphones push Twitter revenue up 30 percent in Brazil

By Brad Haynes | SAO PAULO

   

    Twitter Inc has found a bright spot in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, even as weak advertising sales across the globe have punished the social network's stock in recent weeks.

    Advertising revenue rose about 30 percent in Brazil last year, Twitter's top executive in the country told Reuters, defying a two-year slowdown in the local economy and more than doubling the company's 13 percent revenue growth globally.

Twitter, which does not break down its revenue by country, gave no concrete sales numbers in Brazilian or U.S. currency. It was an unusual move for the company to give details on its performance in one country.

    "Brazil is a motor of growth for Twitter, both in users and in revenue," said Fiamma Zarife in a recent interview.

    A surge of interest in real-time marketing around the Olympics, which Rio de Janeiro hosted in August, brought new clients to the platform, she said, and rising smartphone use continues to generate user growth in the country.

    The performance in Brazil last year may have been a bright spot for Twitter, but the company is still struggling to convince investors it can win the global war for online advertising against rivals Snapchat and Facebook Inc. Earlier this month, Twitter posted its slowest quarterly revenue growth since it went public four years ago, sending its shares down more than 10 percent to a seven-month low.

 

THIRD-FASTEST

   

    While the number of Twitter's monthly active users worldwide edged up 4 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, it jumped 18 percent in Brazil, the third-fastest-growing market over that period, according to Zarife.

    Zarife said there is more room to run in Brazil as smartphone use continues to grow. Just 70 percent of Brazilians on Twitter connect via the mobile app, compared to about 83 percent globally. Smartphone penetration doubled in two years to 40 percent of Brazilians last year, according to pollster Ibope. That has boosted many tech companies in the country, even as Brazil's economy struggles with its deepest recession on record.

    Digital ad spending in the country was expected to grow 12 percent in 2016 to 10.4 billion reais ($3.4 billion), according to industry group IAB Brasil.

    Zarife said her strategy for attracting both users and advertising will be to focus on video content and live events. Brazil was second only to the United States in Twitter conversations about the Super Bowl, she said.

    The strategy paid off during the Olympics, when Zarife said several clients including Banco Bradesco SA, a sponsor of the event, stepped up marketing on Twitter and were convinced to keep a strong presence on the platform since then. Zarife, formerly head of agency relations in Brazil, took the top job in the country last month from Guilherme Ribenboim, who remains Twitter's vice president for Latin America.

Available at: <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-brazil-idUSKBN16208U>. Access on: February 2017.

According to the text, read the options and choose the CORRECT alternative.

I. Due to the increase of Twitter’s use in Brazil, its revenue has more than doubled.

II. Twitter has been increasing more than Facebook and Snapchat.

III. With an increase of 18 percent of active users in Brazil, it has become one of the top growing markets in the world.

IV. This growth is happening only because everyone uses a smartphone in Brazil.

V. Banco Bradesco and many other banks are increasing their marketing on the Twitter platform.

What global problem is showed in the cartoon?  

Considering the author’s comparison between Brazilian and American culture, it is CORRECT to state that: 

 

Who’s Listening?  

 

Brazilians are so polite that they say hello to strangers when they enter an elevator. My wife and I were spending a week at the beach in the Northeast of Brazil. Each time we entered the hotel elevator, my wife, who is Brazilian, would say Good Morning to other hotel guests. Inevitably, there were replies from people we obviously didn’t know or even recognize. As an American, I’m struck by this cordiality. It’s also customary to greet strangers in Brazil when entering a waiting room in a doctor’s office. I’ve seen my wife talk to complete strangers in elevators, on planes, in waiting rooms, and on line at the bank; I’ve concluded that only the most ardent recluse could be alone in Brazil. It would require a concerted effort to avoid human contact here. You would need to pretend to be a deaf mute to get away with it. Sunglasses to fake blindness wouldn’t work, as it would elicit strangers taking your arm to guide you across the street. Brazilians are so polite that when they cross the threshold of your home, they say Excuse Me, the same expression in Portuguese waiters use when they bring food to your table. Brazilians are so polite that if you’re invited for lunch in someone’s home, don’t expect to find salt/pepper on the table. It’s impolite to the cook to add salt to the food after you’ve been served. Drivers are so polite that they wait patiently while a car blocks a narrow street to discharge a passenger. If the delay in traffic becomes interminable, a driver will flash his headlights. A driver complaining with his horn is so shocking it would cause more accidents than it prevents.  

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I, Robot  

 

Suggested by Isaac Asimov's, classic sci-fi collection. It's Chicago in 2035, and Will Smith is a detective who's not fond of the ever-growing population of robots who—to his mind—are taking over the world. Of course, everyone else thinks he's nuts, even when the premier robotics scientist dies under mysterious circumstances.

Strip away the effects created by the dozen or so special effects houses (I lost count), and you have a pretty basic plot: rugged individualist suspects conspiracy even though everyone doubts him, and enlists the aid of an attractive sidekick (Bridget Moynahan) to fight evil. Even Smith's boss is a skeptical-but-sympathetic beefy black guy. But enjoyment is in the selling, and Will can sell. The reveal of how Smith came to his beliefs is nicely paced and the "am I machine or being" thread is reasonably portrayed. Mix in some inventive action scenes, and you have a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie with intellectual aspirations. 

 

According to the text is CORRECT to state that:

 

1. The whole movie is too obvious in the writer’s opinion.

2. The author does not recommend the movie.  

3. There are many special effects.

4. The movie is old-fashioned.

5. It is a good movie in the author’s opinion. 

Read the text.  

 

ALIENS, THE RISK OF MEDICAL CARE & MORE: 5 THINGS WE LEARNED THIS WEEK  

Nicholas Loffredo  

 

From the danger of overprescribing antiobiotics to why we don't delete annoying Facebook friends, here are five things we learned in Tech & Science this week: 

They're out there. Intelligent, alien life forms almost certainly existed on a distant planet, according to a study published in the journal Astrobiology. Using NASA data, the study found stars with planets at temperatures that would support life. Given that, the researchers estimate there only is a one in 10 billion trillion chance humans are the only intelligent life form to have existed.  

Medical errors kill more people annually than do strokes and pneumonia and are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., according to a study in the BMJ. Some 250,000 people die each year from medical errors, and the authors of the study argue for an overhaul in how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collect data on causes of death. 

Surprise? Promoting abstinence does not lower HIV rates or prevents unwanted pregnancies. Researchers studied data on 500,000 people in 22 countries from 1998 to 2013 in countries served by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provided abstinence education, and data from countries without such lessons. They concluded that there was little to no difference in sexual behavior, regardless of whether people had been exposed to abstinence programs or not.  

It turns out there is a reason we don't unfriend the annoying Facebook "friend" who constantly fills our feeds with idiotic memes and their uninformed rants: We worry about the social repercussions, regardless of how little contact we have with them in real life. Researchers at Nottingham Trent University had Facebook users rate randomly selected friends for closeness and the degree to which they disagree with their online presence. It turns out "they don’t want to communicate with the troublemakers online for risk of damaging their own reputation, but at the same time they don’t appear to want to unfriend them either.”

We are being overprescribed antiobiotics, and the practice is helping us all to develop a resistance to the often lifesaving medication. A study in JAMA found that approximately 30 percent of antiobiotics prescriptions from 2010 to 2011 were unnecessary; the consequences include the inability to beat back illness and the development of severe allergies that leave antibiotics unsafe to use.

Available in: . Access on: May 2016.

 

The highlighted words from the text can be replaced, without changing the meaning, by  

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When Schoolteachers Could Win Prizes for Being ‘Prettiest’  

Lily Rothman  

 

On National Teacher Appreciation Day, remembering a time when teachers were appreciated for something other than their teaching. 

In today’s world, the schoolteachers who are appreciated by society are—we hope—those who inspire children to learn and whose classrooms will long be remembered by their students as the places where education came alive. In 1953, those things were important too. But, judging by this LIFE story from that February, skill wasn’t all.]

Nell Owen taught speech class to first- through sixth-graders in Dallas, and she was—according to a contest to which her students submitted her picture—the “prettiest teacher in the U.S.” The contest, as LIFE explained, was sponsored by the hit CBS radio (and later television) program Our Miss Brooks, which starred Eve Arden as a high-school teacher. The prize was a trip to meet Arden in Hollywood. Though the show was a comedy, its subject matter wasn’t all frivolous: the first episode starts with Miss Brooks’ enthusiasm for her work and another episode depicted Miss Brooks confronting the lack of resources for heating fuel at her school.  

That juxtaposition of lightheartedness and serious education matters would also prove appropriate for a contest won by Owen. While the ranking of elementary-school teachers by their looks seems quite retrograde these days, her career was about more than her face. The principal of her school told LIFE that he had worried she would be “another discipline case” whom “those kiddos will take…by storm.” After a year of teaching, at only 21 years old, Owen had been dubbed “durable as she is fetching.”

Available in: . Access on: May 2016.

 

The meaning of the expression “durable as she is fetching” is: