Questões de Inglês

RUM IN VENEZUELA

    Some wondered if the bosses of Venezuela’s oldest rum company had been sampling [provando] too much of their product. In January, with Venezuela in one of the deepest recessions in modern world history, Ron Santa Teresa launched the country’s first public share issue [oferta de ações ao público] in more than a decade. The new equity [ações, participação financeira] was priced in bolívares, the world’s worst performing currency. Others speculated

that the rum-maker, which daringly notes on its website that its distillery in the Aragua valley near Caracas has survived “wars, revolutions, invasions, even dictators”, had decided that change was taking place.

    Evidence of the second interpretation is that the latest dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has recently become a capitalist, sort of. The disciple of Hugo Chávez (whose "21st-century socialism" set Venezuela on its road to ruin) has quietly lifted price controls and restrictions on dollar transactions. He now says firms can issue shares in hard currencies [moedas estáveis, de confiança]. He is thought to be contemplating a sale to foreign investors of a stake [participação financeira] in PDVSA, the decrepit state oil company.

    Ron Santa Teresa’s president, Alberto Vollmer, a fifth-generation rum-maker, says the company, whose shares were already listed, needs the money to buy barrels and build warehouses. It signed an international-distribution deal with Bacardi in 2016. Mr. Maduro’s tentative pro-market turn is “a happy coincidence”, he says. The sale of 1 million shares, which raised the equivalent of $300,000, was a fillip [estímulo] for the near-dormant stock market, which lists just 31 companies. Demand exceeded supply.

    The investors are not as daft [tolos, malucos] as you might think. Although denominated in bolívares, share prices tend to keep pace with inflation. This has dropped, from an annual rate of more than 2 million% early in 2019 to a mere 9,500% for the year. That is partly because the government has increased the amount of reserves that banks must hold.

    But this has caused a shortage of bolívares. The total amount of bank loans is the equivalent of $225 million, less than 0.5% of GDP [PIB]. Sanctions imposed by the United States and EU have made lending harder. The share issue raised more money in a day than the large banks could lend to Mr Vollmer’s firm.

    No one expects a dramatic recovery of the economy, which has shrunk by two-thirds since Mr Maduro took over from Chávez in 2013. But Mr Vollmer welcomes the shift towards pragmatism. ”That is what happens when you run out of money to fund ideas that didn’t work.”

Adapted from The Economist, February 8th 2020.

THE PERILS OF POLYGAMY

    Men in South Sudan typically marry as often as their wealth—often measured in cattle—will allow. Perhaps 40% of marriages are polygamous. “In [our] culture, the more family you have, the more people respect you,” says William, a young IT specialist in search of his second wife (his name, like some others in this article, has been changed). Having studied in America and come back to his home village, he finds that he is wealthy by local standards. So why be content with just one bride?

    Few South Sudanese see the connection between these matrimonial customs and the country’s horrific civil war. If you ask them the reason for the violence, locals will blame tribalism, greedy politicians, weak institutions and perhaps the oil wealth which gives warlords something to fight over. All true, but not the whole story.

    Wherever it is widely practiced, polygamy destabilizes society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men. If a rich man has a Lamborghini, that does not mean that a poor man has to walk, for the supply of cars is not fixed. By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

    This is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent. Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbors and more prone to collapse than others are. The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO. Because polygamy is illegal in most rich countries, many Westerners underestimate how common it is. More than a third of women in West Africa are married to a man who has more than one wife. Plural marriages are plentiful in the Arab world, and fairly common in South-East Asia and a few parts of the Caribbean. The cultures involved are usually patrilineal: ie, the family is defined by the male bloodline. And they are patrilocal: wives join the husband’s family and leave their own behind. Marriages are often sealed by the payment of a brideprice from the groom’s family to the bride’s. This is supposed to compensate the bride’s family for the cost of raising her.

    Brideprice societies where wealth is unevenly distributed lend themselves to polygamy—which in turn inflates the price of brides. By increasing the brideprice, polygamy tends to raise the age at which young men get married; it takes a long time to save enough money. At the same time, it lowers the age at which women get married. All but the wealthiest families need to “sell” their daughters before they can afford to “buy” wives for their sons; they also want the wives they shell out for to be young and fertile. In South Sudan a girl is called an old lady at age 20 because she cannot bear many children after that,” a local man said. A tribal elder spelled out the maths of the situation. “When you have 10 daughters, each one will give you 30 cows, and they are all for [the father]. So then you have 300 cows.” If a patriarch sells his daughters at 15 and does not let his sons marry until they are 30, he has15 years to enjoy the returns on the assets he gained from brideprice. That’s a lot of milk.

Adapted from The Economist, December 23, 2017.

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The virus and the way we internet

    With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates.

    While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text — we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google’s video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together. We have also grown much more interested in our immediate environment, and how it is changing and responding to the virus and the quarantine measures. Amid the uncertainty about how bad the outbreak could get, Americans appear to want few things more than the latest news on the coronavirus. Among the biggest beneficiaries are local news sites, as people try to learn how the pandemic is affecting their hometowns.

    Americans have also been seeking out more established media brands. CNBC, the business news site, has seen readership skyrocket. The websites for The New York Times and The Washington Post have both grown traffic more than 50 percent over the last month. The desire for the latest facts on the virus appears to be curbing interest in the more opinionated takes from partisan sites, which have defined the media landscape in recent years. Publications like The Daily Caller, on the right, and Truthdig, on the left, have recorded stagnant or falling numbers. Beating all of the news sites, in terms of increased popularity, is the home page for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been attracting millions of readers after previously having almost none.

(Available: https://www.nytimes.com. By Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper. April 7, 2020. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer.

The virus and the way we internet

    With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates.

    While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text — we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google’s video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together. We have also grown much more interested in our immediate environment, and how it is changing and responding to the virus and the quarantine measures. Amid the uncertainty about how bad the outbreak could get, Americans appear to want few things more than the latest news on the coronavirus. Among the biggest beneficiaries are local news sites, as people try to learn how the pandemic is affecting their hometowns.

    Americans have also been seeking out more established media brands. CNBC, the business news site, has seen readership skyrocket. The websites for The New York Times and The Washington Post have both grown traffic more than 50 percent over the last month. The desire for the latest facts on the virus appears to be curbing interest in the more opinionated takes from partisan sites, which have defined the media landscape in recent years. Publications like The Daily Caller, on the right, and Truthdig, on the left, have recorded stagnant or falling numbers. Beating all of the news sites, in terms of increased popularity, is the home page for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been attracting millions of readers after previously having almost none.

(Available: https://www.nytimes.com. By Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper. April 7, 2020. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer.

The virus and the way we internet

    With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates.

    While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text — we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google’s video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together. We have also grown much more interested in our immediate environment, and how it is changing and responding to the virus and the quarantine measures. Amid the uncertainty about how bad the outbreak could get, Americans appear to want few things more than the latest news on the coronavirus. Among the biggest beneficiaries are local news sites, as people try to learn how the pandemic is affecting their hometowns.

    Americans have also been seeking out more established media brands. CNBC, the business news site, has seen readership skyrocket. The websites for The New York Times and The Washington Post have both grown traffic more than 50 percent over the last month. The desire for the latest facts on the virus appears to be curbing interest in the more opinionated takes from partisan sites, which have defined the media landscape in recent years. Publications like The Daily Caller, on the right, and Truthdig, on the left, have recorded stagnant or falling numbers. Beating all of the news sites, in terms of increased popularity, is the home page for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been attracting millions of readers after previously having almost none.

(Available: https://www.nytimes.com. By Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper. April 7, 2020. Adapted.)

Read the text to answer.

The virus and the way we internet

    With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates.

    While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text — we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google’s video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together. We have also grown much more interested in our immediate environment, and how it is changing and responding to the virus and the quarantine measures. Amid the uncertainty about how bad the outbreak could get, Americans appear to want few things more than the latest news on the coronavirus. Among the biggest beneficiaries are local news sites, as people try to learn how the pandemic is affecting their hometowns.

    Americans have also been seeking out more established media brands. CNBC, the business news site, has seen readership skyrocket. The websites for The New York Times and The Washington Post have both grown traffic more than 50 percent over the last month. The desire for the latest facts on the virus appears to be curbing interest in the more opinionated takes from partisan sites, which have defined the media landscape in recent years. Publications like The Daily Caller, on the right, and Truthdig, on the left, have recorded stagnant or falling numbers. Beating all of the news sites, in terms of increased popularity, is the home page for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been attracting millions of readers after previously having almost none.

(Available: https://www.nytimes.com. By Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper. April 7, 2020. Adapted.)