Questões de Inglês

     Call it “Zoom face-envy”. Because of the rise of video-conferencing during the pandemic, legions now spend hours staring at their own faces and, inevitably, comparing them with those of others. Actually, poor lighting and the skewed angles of laptop cameras are rarely flattering. Nor is “lockdown face”, brought on by stress, or a lack of sunlight and exercise. For Kim, a 57-year-old actress in New York City, Zoom seemed to add ten pounds and a “crepey” look to her skin. After seeing “way too much” of that, she got a facelift last summer. She is delighted with the result. Similarly, Michèle Le Tournelle, a 62-year-old retiree near Nantes in France, said the “horrible” confinement turned into “a revelation”: it spurred her to undergo a slimming procedure and a facelift with which she has been “very, very, very” pleased.

     Many cosmetic surgeons had expected the pandemic to hammer business. Instead the industry is enjoying a Zoom-boom. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reckons that the pandemic has led to a 10% increase in cosmetic surgery countrywide. In France, despite limits on elective procedures during the pandemic, cosmetic surgeries are up by nearly 20%, estimates the French Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. For Ashton Collins, the boss of Save Face, a firm in Cardiff that refers people seeking minimally invasive cosmetic treatments to the 852 (and counting) practitioners it has accredited across Britain, business is “through the roof”. In Italy, Pier Andrea Cicogna of Studio Cicogna, a plastic-surgery clinic in Treviso, says his revenue has risen by nearly a third despite more than three months of closure.

CALL IT… Disponivel em: http://www.economist.com. Acesso em: mai. 2022

The expression “through the roof” used by Ashton Collins when talking about cosmetic procedures in Britain, means that business there has

Leia o texto a seguir e responda à questão.

 

Social Media: a Gold Mine for Scammers in 2021

 

    Social media permeates the lives of many people – we use it to (1)______ in touch, (2)______ new friends, shop, and (3)______ fun. But reports to the FTC (Federal Trade Comission) show that social media is also increasingly where scammers go to trick us. More than one in four people who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message. More than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses to fraud initiated on social media platforms in 2021.

    For scammers, there’s a lot to like about social media. It’s a low-cost way to reach billions of people from anywhere in the world. It’s easy to manufacture a fake persona, or scammers can hack into an existing profile to get “friends” to trick. There’s the ability to study the personal details people share on social media and target people with false ads based on details such as their age, interests, or past purchases.

    Reports make clear that social media is a tool for scammers in investment scams, particularly cryptocurrency investments. After investment scams, FTC data point to romance scams as the second most profitable fraud on social media. Losses to romance scams have climbed to record highs in recent years. While investment and romance scams top the list on dollars lost, the largest number of reports came from people who said they were scammed trying to buy something they saw marketed on social media. Some reports even described ads that impersonated real online retailers that drove people to lookalike websites.

    There are many other frauds on social media and new ones are popping up all the time. To minimize your risk, decline friend requests from people you don’t know, limit who can see your posts and personal information, be thoughtful about what you share online, and take care with suspect links. 

Adapted from https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/data-spotlight/2022/01/social-media-gold-mine-scammers-2021.

The second paragraph of the text states that

Question relate to the song below

 

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Bob Dylan

 

Come gather 'round, people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin'

 

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

 

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

 

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

 

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times, they are a-changin'

The sentence that best describes the conclusion reached by the song in the last stanza is:

Question relate to the song below

 

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Bob Dylan

 

Come gather 'round, people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin'

 

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

 

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

 

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

 

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times, they are a-changin'

The third stanza of the song sends a message about change to “senators, congressman”. That message is best described by the sentence:

Question refers to the advert below:

The advert above is one of the several created by the British Government’s National Health Service depicting real patients being treated for Covid 19. The image is contrasted by a sentence that forces people to think of their own actions regarding the pandemic.

 

In this advert, the sentence “Look him in the eyes and tell him the risk isn’t real”, is directed mainly to:

Read the text below to answer question.

 

Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes

Elle Hunt
The Guardian Sat 16 Oct 2021

 

Tourist board in Austrian capital rails against censorship of art on social media platforms

 

More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom”, the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adultsonly platform OnlyFans. Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries.

In July, the Albertina Museum’s new TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for showing works by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that showed an obscured female breast, forcing the museum to start a new account. This followed a similar incident in 2019, when Instagram ruled that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens violated the platform’s community standards which prohibit any depictions of nudity – even those that are “artistic or creative in nature”.

These works and more are now on full display, safe from the threat of censorship, on Vienna’s OnlyFans profile – and only teased from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Helena Hartlauer, a Vienna tourist board spokesperson, said the city and its cultural institutions had been finding it “almost impossible” to use nude artworks in promotional materials.

The first subscribers to “Vienna’s 18+ content” on OnlyFans will receive either a Vienna City Card or an admission ticket to see one of the artworks in person. Hartlauer said the new “Vienna strips on OnlyFans” campaign was not just to encourage tourists; it was also to raise awareness of the censorious standards within which contemporary artists are working.

Instagram, along with its parent company, Facebook, has retained its strict no-nudity policy in the face of years of criticism, and even as it has become a more essential platform for artists. In July, creatives protested against social media networks’ uneven promotion of their work with the hashtag #FixTheAlgorithm. “Compared to the artists who fall under this censorship, the tourist board in Vienna and even the art collections have it easier,” said Hartlauer. “We just want to question: do we need these limitations? Who decides what to censor? Instagram censors images and sometimes you don’t even know about it – it’s very untransparent.”

OnlyFans was founded in 2016 to be a more permissive and fair platform for online creators of all kinds, though it became synonymous with sex work through the pandemic. Last year the site exploded from 7.5 million to 85 million users, paying out more than $2bn (£1.45bn) in subscription fees to 1 million creators.

Ironically, the Vienna tourist board, having decided to launch a presence on OnlyFans, encountered barriers promoting it. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all rejected links to the platform, requiring the board to liaise with their service teams, in some cases over weeks.

Hartlauer said the hurdles to launching the campaign proved its point about the insidious power of social media platforms to influence and suppress artistic expression. “It shows us again that this is the right question to be asking.” “This marketing initiative of ours is not the ultimate solution for this problematic relationship between the art world and social media, but … we want to stand up for our values and our beliefs,” she said. “Vienna has always been famous for being open-minded.”

The sentence “Compared to the artists who fall under this censorship, the tourist board in Vienna and even the art collections have it easier, (…)” allows the reader to infer that: