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.

 

As the text mentions, “running low on Americans” changes the country into a nation that will be

The practice of solidarity entails weaving a fabric of fraternal relationships marked by reciprocity, forgiveness and?

Which of these sentences is grammatically correct?

Após a leitura do texto, escolha uma alternativa correta sobre solidariedade.

 

Solidarity is one of the universal and fundamental values above all else. One of the most recent human rights on which international relations should be based, so that those who suffer or have less benefit from the help of the more affluent. This was one of the main reasons that led the United Nations General Assembly in December 2005 to proclaim 20 December of each year as the International Day of Human Solidarity.

https://www.moneytrans.eu/moneytransblog/en/solidarity-the-mosthuman-value/ acesso 09/04/2021

Although the word rights is often used to defend points of view or comment on events, most people don‘t know exactly what rights are those, nor are they aware of the long history behind them.

 

Nesse sentindo da afirmação anterior, leia o texto a seguir e escolha a alternativa que reflete a base de proteção dos direitos humanos.

 

Human rights can be defined as basic rights and freedoms that all people are entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, language, or other status. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the basis of the international system of protection for human rights. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10th, 1948 and so this day is celebrated annually as International Human Rights Day.

Disponível em: http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/human-rightsbasics. Acesso. 09. Abril.2021

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

UN Volunteers in Congo, together with France Volontaires and the RAVSI platform, launched the Mask4All initiative to distribute 2,500 masks to the poorest people in Brazzaville, including the elderly, pregnant women and persons with disabilities. UNV, 2020

 

Veronique Zidi-Aporeigah, Regional Manager, UNV Regional Office for West and Central Africa

This year marks 30 years since I started working in the UN system, mostly at the UN Volunteers program. Looking back at my experience, I have never witnessed a time like what we have experienced since the emergence of COVID-19. We have all been impacted directly or indirectly by this horrible pandemic that has spread across the world. If there is one thing I have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that solidarity is a strong value that stands the test of time and circumstances.

Na passagem a seguir, extraída do texto: “I have never witnessed a time like what we have experienced since the emergence of COVID-19”, encontram-se dois tempos verbais, quais?