Questões de Inglês

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans

    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.

    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.

    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.

    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.

    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.

    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.

    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.

    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.

    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.

    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.

    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades.

    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    It is the most ambitious move in the history of the Louvre — a five-year project to transfer a quarter of a million artworks to an ultramodern storage site 120 miles away in northern France.

    For more than 16 months, a stream of trucks has quietly hauled treasures from the museum’s central Paris basement, and other sites, to the Louvre Conservation Center, a fortress of culture set up in the town of Liévin, near Lens. Already 100,000 works have been moved — including paintings, carpets, tapestries, grand sculptures, small figurines, furniture and decorative pieces — dating from antiquity to the 19th century.

    With museums in France closed because of the pandemic, Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, has time on his hands. He took a small group of reporters on a tour of the newly operational site, which is intended to become one of Europe’s largest art research centers and to welcome museum experts, scholars and conservators from around the world.

    The Louvre sits on low ground along the banks of the Seine. In 2016, flooding in Paris was so severe that the museum itself was threatened, prompting a round-the-clock, emergency operation to wrap, crate and haul thousands of art objects out of underground storage and onto higher ground. The conservation project in Liévin, costing 60 million euros, or about $73 million, began in late 2017 as a necessary response to the river’s unpredictable, inevitable rise.

    “The reality is that our museum is in a flood zone,” Mr. Martinez said on the tour. “You can’t just pick up and move marble sculptures around,” he noted. “There was a danger that the sewers would back up and that dirty, smelly wastewater would damage the art. We had to find a solution. Urgently.”

    The Louvre considered, then rejected, the idea of building a site close to Paris: too expensive and impractical. Instead, it chose Liévin, a 10-minute walk from the Louvre’s mini- -museum outpost in the adjacent town of Lens, which opened in 2012.

(Elaine Sciolino. www.nytimes.com, 12.02.2021. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    It is the most ambitious move in the history of the Louvre — a five-year project to transfer a quarter of a million artworks to an ultramodern storage site 120 miles away in northern France.

    For more than 16 months, a stream of trucks has quietly hauled treasures from the museum’s central Paris basement, and other sites, to the Louvre Conservation Center, a fortress of culture set up in the town of Liévin, near Lens. Already 100,000 works have been moved — including paintings, carpets, tapestries, grand sculptures, small figurines, furniture and decorative pieces — dating from antiquity to the 19th century.

    With museums in France closed because of the pandemic, Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, has time on his hands. He took a small group of reporters on a tour of the newly operational site, which is intended to become one of Europe’s largest art research centers and to welcome museum experts, scholars and conservators from around the world.

    The Louvre sits on low ground along the banks of the Seine. In 2016, flooding in Paris was so severe that the museum itself was threatened, prompting a round-the-clock, emergency operation to wrap, crate and haul thousands of art objects out of underground storage and onto higher ground. The conservation project in Liévin, costing 60 million euros, or about $73 million, began in late 2017 as a necessary response to the river’s unpredictable, inevitable rise.

    “The reality is that our museum is in a flood zone,” Mr. Martinez said on the tour. “You can’t just pick up and move marble sculptures around,” he noted. “There was a danger that the sewers would back up and that dirty, smelly wastewater would damage the art. We had to find a solution. Urgently.”

    The Louvre considered, then rejected, the idea of building a site close to Paris: too expensive and impractical. Instead, it chose Liévin, a 10-minute walk from the Louvre’s mini- -museum outpost in the adjacent town of Lens, which opened in 2012.

(Elaine Sciolino. www.nytimes.com, 12.02.2021. Adaptado.)

Text

1   Rural producers face a wide range of adverse events that expose them to potentially heavy losses. In
agriculture, both natural risks – such as droughts, floods, pests, diseases, and fires – and market risks –
such as price variation – are frequent. While the modernization of the agricultural sector leads to commodity
specialization and the adoption of technologies with higher expected returns, it may also result in a larger
production variance, creating more uncertainty and increasing producers’ exposure to risk. Modernization
has accelerated in Brazil in recent years, raising the importance of risk management instruments.
2   Brazil has a large potential for improving risk mitigation opportunities for its producers, which will be
even more essential in the face of climate change. Improving risk management practices and public policies
could accelerate the process of modernization and sustainability in Brazilian agricultural production.
Government incentives require a design crafted to meet producers’ needs. In this report, Climate Policy
Initiative/Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (CPI/PUC-Rio) researchers analyze the current risk
management instruments and public policies and discuss pathways for improving their impact on Brazilian
agriculture.

Available at: https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/publication/risk-management-in-brazilian-agricultureinstruments-public-policy-and-perspectives/. Retrieved on: 1 st Sept. 2020. Adapted.

TEXTO:

     I will always remember my delight when Mrs.
Georgia Gilmore — an unlettered woman of unusual
intelligence — told how an operator demanded that
she get off the bus after paying her fare and board it
again by the back door, and then drove away before
she could get there. She turned to Judge Carter and
said: “When they count the money, they do not know
Negro money from white money.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1956 Disponível em: http://www.quotegarden.com/mlk-day.html. Acesso em: 10 nov. 2020.

TEXTO:

    Over the years, China’s one-child policy has been
tied to a range of social ills, such as rising prostitution
and delayed marriage. Now it may be producing
yet another ugly side effect: a spike in crime. Even
[5] as rates have dropped in most Western countries,
official statistics show that China is becoming a more
dangerous place, with murder, robbery, and rape rates
now surpassing those in many European countries.
    Blame men. In January the Chinese Academy of
[10] Social Sciences found that the male-female birth ratio
in China has hit 119 males to 100 females, a new high,
and reaches 130:100 in some provinces. (That’s 10 to
20 percent higher than the average for industrialized
countries.) Some experts link this gap to the surge in
[15] violence. In an April 2009 paper, Columbia University’s
Lena Edlund suggested that the sex gap accounts for
up to one sixth of China’s crime increase between
1988 and 2004. Edlund points the finger at lower
marriage rates, noting that unmarried men are a
[20] destabilizing factor in society.
    Not everyone agrees that the gender gap is a
bad thing; a Columbia Business School study says it
encourages families to save cash to better position
sons in the spouse hunt. This increase in savings may
[25] serve to improve social stability and balance the sex
gap’s negative aspects. The crime increase has also
been attributed to the country’s growing underclass
of migrant workers, and it’s often unclear where the
pressures of work and courtship intersect to drive men
[30] to crime. But as China rises, it may unfortunately find
it’s overtaking the U.S. in crime as well.

FISH, Isaac Stone. China’s sex factor. Newsweek, New York, March 1, 2010 p. 9.