Questões de Inglês

In the sentence “When we came in, I´d have to take all that stuff off” (second frame of the comic strip), Calvin is talking about a hypothetical situation. If he were talking about a real possibility, he would have said:

Egypt’s War on Atheism

By MONA ELTAHAWY

 

  CAIRO — It took one session on Jan. 10 for a court in the Nile Delta province of Beheira to sentence Karim al-Banna, a 21-year-old student, to three years in prison for saying on Facebook that he was an atheist. The student’s lawyer complained that he was denied the right even to present a defense, but an equally chilling aspect of Mr. Banna’s case is that his father testified against him. 

  Also telling is that Mr. Banna was originally arrested, in November, when he went to the police to complain that his neighbors were harassing him. This was after his name had appeared in a local newspaper on a list of known atheists. Instead of protecting him, the police accused him of insulting Islam. 

  Such tag teams of family, media and state are not uncommon in cases against atheists. Because atheism itself is not illegal in Egypt, charges are laid under laws against blasphemy or contempt for religion. Similar charges have been used for political purposes against Egypt’s Christian minority. 

  It is no surprise that Mr. Banna’s conviction occurred on the watch of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who led the ouster of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to become president. Regardless of which way the seesaw of power in Egypt tips — toward the Islamists or toward the military — it is always a heterosexual, conservative Muslim man who heads the moral hierarchy. The further from that identity you are, the more vulnerable you are. 

  Nowhere is this morality power play exercised more vehemently than in curbing  perceived religious and sex crimes. Hence Egypt’s witch hunt against gay men. Rights activists say that 2014 was the worst year in a decade for gay people in Egypt, with at least 150 men arrested or put on trial. Same-sex relationships are not illegal, but gay men are targeted under “debauchery” laws. 

  In a speech this month honoring the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Mr. Sisi called on Muslim leaders in Egypt to start a “religious revolution” to counter the jihadist message of the Islamic State. He also sent his foreign minister to the solidarity march after the attacks in Paris at the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. 

  The contradiction in Mr. Sisi’s aim of keeping the heterosexual, conservative Muslim man at the top of Egypt’s moral hierarchy is glaring. You can’t trump the Islamists in their piety and lead a campaign against minorities like atheists and gay men even as you condemn extremist violence and show solidarity for free speech and free thinking. 

 

  Despite the clampdown, atheists are openly challenging such hypocrisy. Social media has allowed those who “deviate” from the authoritarian template to find one another and express themselves in ways that the regime, its men of religion and its media otherwise deny them. 

(adapted from nytimes.com, January 27th , 2015 )

The underlined words harassing, contempt, conviction, glaring in the text are the equivalent to:

Fidel Loses the Race to the Grave 

It’s fitting that the thaw was brokered by a president who wasn’t alive when Castro came to power. 

 

  The world now has the answer to a question as old as the New World Order: Which would die first? Fidel Castro? Or the chokehold his angry critics maintained on U.S. foreign policy since El Comandante came to power in Cuba 55 years ago? It was entirely fitting that the answer was delivered by an American president whose own age is 53. As he noted in his historic address from the White House, Barak Obama was born two years after Castro’s Communist guerrillas swept into Havana. Like the children and grandchildren of the Cubans who fled to Miami after the Communists arrived, the events Obama actually lived through were the ones that steadily reduced the island from a marquee venue of the Cold War — the thrust stage from which, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Armageddon was nearly launched — to whatever the place qualifies as today: basically a scenic relic of Marxism, with beaches and cigars. 

  Other stout lobbies remain as present as their animating issue: The NRA likely will be around as long as gun owners are, and the Israel lobby as long as the state. But the U.S. government’s determined, and solitary isolation of Cuba was, as Obama alluded, a victim of generational change. The collapse of the Soviet Union, so thrillingly dramatic, was followed by the more gradual senescence of those who had invested most in opposing its most famous client state. 

  Time waits for no man, not even Fidel. The regime that Fidel once made a model of resistance to U.S. dominance is now run by his 83-year-old kid brother. It was Raul Castro who spoke from Havana at the same moment Obama made his historic address, the two speeches pre-arranged by the leaders’ staffs to begin at the same hour, signaling both sides’ commitment to a new era of cooperation. 

   But the Cuban side appeared to be locked in that other era: Raul Castro was seated between dark paneling and a massive desk. The framed snapshots at his elbows were in black and white — the kind of vintage photographs that adorn the Hotel Nacional at the edge of the magnificent ruin that is Havana’s Old City. The glossies in the hotel are there for the tourists, images of the like of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack making themselves at home in a version of Havana glamour familiar to Americans who — forbidden by the travel restrictions Obama says will be pushed away — last saw the city in The Godfather Part II, or any other movie set in Cuba before Castro took over. 

  The reality just outside the hotel’s doors is far more compelling, from the ardent struggles of human rights activists and artists, to the joyously sensual quality of street life in what may well be the sexiest capital city in the world. Americans who dared to visit — it wasn’t hard, routing through Canada or Cancun — returned with enthusiastic reports of a poor but intensely vibrant society. Its economy may be a shambles now, but the island’s physical features alone, including 2,300 miles of Caribbean coastline not an hour from the U.S., all but assure development, especially by American retirees. Which would be fitting as well, since they would be old enough to appreciate just how time can change things. 

(adapted from www.time.com, December 17th 2014)

The pronoun its in the sentence: “The collapse of the Soviet Union, so thrillingly dramatic, was followed by the more gradual senescence of those who had invested most in opposing its most famous client state.” refers to:

GLOBALISATION, HUMANISM, MODERNITY: IN SEARCH OF EQUILIBRIUM

Monica Grigorescu*

Our time has proved to be amazingly effective in gropingly building up

a civilization which it has proved amazingly inept at putting in order.

(André Maliaux)

 

  After so many crises which have followed each other in as many areas, we ought to admit that industrial and technological civilization is creating as many problems as it is capable of resolving. The myth of progress, one of the founding myths of our civilization, also appears to have collapsed as a myth. The development of modern society, spectacular as it is from an economist’s angle of vision, has not been able to society; stop a slide into human and moral underdevelopment. A deterioration of quality in relation to quantity makes only those things that can be actually measured appear to be real; unfortunately, things like poetry, suffering, or love are hardly quantifiable.

  Towards the end of his eventful life, Jean Monnet, a remarkable figure of the twentieth century, reasoned that, had he been able to start all over again, he would have begun with culture. A founding father of what was later to become the European Union, he expressed that belated belief in the pre-eminent role of culture as a part of greater civilization after he had tried for several decades to build a prosperous Europe in economic terms in the aftermath of a devastating war.

*Director of the House of Latin America of the Ministry of Foreign Affair of Romania.

Revista Direito Mackenzie

Na sentença, “…he expressed that belated belief in the pre-eminent role of culture…” a palavra grifada pode ser substituída por

GLOBALISATION, HUMANISM, MODERNITY: IN SEARCH OF EQUILIBRIUM

Monica Grigorescu*

Our time has proved to be amazingly effective in gropingly building up

a civilization which it has proved amazingly inept at putting in order.

(André Maliaux)

 

  After so many crises which have followed each other in as many areas, we ought to admit that industrial and technological civilization is creating as many problems as it is capable of resolving. The myth of progress, one of the founding myths of our civilization, also appears to have collapsed as a myth. The development of modern society, spectacular as it is from an economist’s angle of vision, has not been able to society; stop a slide into human and moral underdevelopment. A deterioration of quality in relation to quantity makes only those things that can be actually measured appear to be real; unfortunately, things like poetry, suffering, or love are hardly quantifiable.

  Towards the end of his eventful life, Jean Monnet, a remarkable figure of the twentieth century, reasoned that, had he been able to start all over again, he would have begun with culture. A founding father of what was later to become the European Union, he expressed that belated belief in the pre-eminent role of culture as a part of greater civilization after he had tried for several decades to build a prosperous Europe in economic terms in the aftermath of a devastating war.

*Director of the House of Latin America of the Ministry of Foreign Affair of Romania.

Revista Direito Mackenzie

A alternativa que melhor expressa a idéia da frase “had he been able to start all over again, he would have begun with culture” é:

  Finally, vindication for power nappers. Far from being lazy louts, siesta-takers are actually doing their bit for the firm. According to Sara Mednick and her colleagues at Harvard, just 60 minutes of shut-eye in the middle of the day can make you perform like the fresh daisy you were first thing in the morning. But it has to be bona fide sleep; a mere rest, they found, has no effect.

  Dr. Mednick, whose results have just been published in Nature Neuroscience, wanted to know what effect power napping would have on people’s visual perception. She asked 30 student volunteers to come into her laboratory. Four times on the same day, at 9am, noon, 4pm and 7pm, they were required to stare at a computer screen for an hour. Their task was to pick out a vertical or horizontal bar from a striped background - an established test of visual perceptiveness. The more quickly they picked out the bar, the more acute their perception.

  All the volunteers had slept well in the days before the test, and had been warned off alcohol. During the test day, nicotine addicts were allowed to indulge their habits, but everyone had to remain uncaffeinated. Despite this cosseting, the performance of the ten volunteers who went straight through the day without a nap deteriorated rapidly. Their best scores were first thing in the morning, and it was downhill from there on. By the last session, they were taking 52% longer, on average, to identify the orientation of the bar than they had in the first.

The Economist

 

According to the text, the wrong alternative is