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Driven by pre-salt, oil becomes Brazil's top export

Revenues

The discovery of the pre-salt was so significant for Brazil's oil production potential that it led the government to change the regime that authorized companies to explore the submerged resources.

As a result, the pre-salt areas are governed by the sharing regime. Under this model, surplus oil production—the balance after covering costs—is divided between the company and the Brazilian government. During the auction that authorizes exploration, the company offering the highest share of profits to the federal government is granted the right to explore.

This is distinct from the concession model, which applies to the post-salt period. In this system, the risk of investment and exploration lies with the concessionaire, who becomes the owner of all the oil and gas that may be discovered. In return, the company pays royalties and special participation fees, particularly for large production fields, in addition to a signature bonus upon winning the auction.

New frontiers 

With the pre-salt expected to reach its peak in the 2030s, Brazil's oil industry, led by Petrobras, is shifting its focus to new oil frontiers that are believed to hold significant production potential.

One such frontier is the so-called equatorial margin, located off Brazil's northern coast, where exploration is pending a favorable decision from the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), an agency under the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change.

Another promising region is the Pelotas Basin, located off Brazil's southern coast. The growing interest in this area is fueled by the discovery of oil wells in Uruguay and off the coasts of Namibia and South Africa. Experts suggest that the geological conditions in these regions are similar, as the continents were once joined tens of millions of years ago.

According to Petrobras, the company plans to invest $79 billion in exploring new oil and gas frontiers by 2029. Of this amount, 40 percent will be allocated to the South and Southeast regions, 38 percent to the equatorial margin, with the remainder directed towards other countries.

From MOURA, Bruno de Freitas. Driven by pre-salt, oil becomes Brazil's top export. Rio de Janeiro, Agência Brasil, Jan 18th,2025. Accessed on February 21st, 2025   

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow.

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Should schools just say no to pupils using phones?

14th July 2024

Natalie Grice – BBC News

“I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a child never to have a smartphone. I think it’s part of a balanced life. You’ve got to live in your own time.”

These are not the words you might expect to hear from a teacher at a school that has never in its history allowed pupils under sixth form age to use a mobile phone on the premises.

But Sarah Owen, deputy head at Stanwell School in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, was simply expressing a personal opinion, rather than the school’s view about a young person’s wider life.

It is clear that she and the school have very firm opinions on what is best for children while they are on school grounds.

For Stanwell pupils in years 7 to 11, that has always meant no phones. Not in lessons, not in the corridor, not at breaktimes.

It is such a long-established rule that it presumably comes as no surprise to pupils and parents when they join the school, which is starting to seem as if it may have been ahead of a growing curve.

In the past few years, a number of schools across Wales and further afield have introduced total bans on mobiles. While Stanwell only asks pupils to keep phones switched off in their bags, others require the devices to be handed in at the start of the day.

Llanidloes High School in Powys is one which has implemented this policy in the past few years and Ysgol Penrhyn Dewi in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, followed suit at the start of this year.

Sarah Owen has been at Stanwell School since 2000 and says that there has always been a no phone policy in the school. For Sarah, it is a question not of trying to impinge on their students’ freedom, but of giving them vital time away from mobile life, for welfare as well as educational reasons.

“We genuinely believe this is in their best interests,” she said. “Phone addiction and screen addiction and scrolling, the loss of concentration, the loss of soft skills around listening and interacting with others, that’s something we need to be concerned about as a society generally.”

“We want children to be interacting with each other, having conversations, playing football, having those connections and interactions with other people.”

Sarah also believes it gives pupils relief from the possibility of being “photographed, filmed, mocked in some way – that’s not a nice way for children to live”. She said she wanted her pupils to have “some sanctuary from the anxiety of feeling so scrutinised and looked at”. 

Adapted from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles

Available at: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1970/10/22. Accessed on: Sept 3rd, 2024.

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Reading skill will help you to improve your understanding of the language and build your vocabulary.

Read the text below carefully.

Social media, magazines and shop windows bombard people daily with things to buy, and British consumers are buying more clothes and shoes than ever before. Online shopping means it is easy for customers to buy without thinking, while major brands offer such cheap clothes that they can be treated like disposable items – worn two or three times and then thrown away

In Britain, the average person spends more than £1,000 on new clothes a year, which is around four per cent of their income. That might not sound like much, but that figure hides two far more worrying trends for society and for the environment. First, a lot of that consumer spending is via credit cards. British people currently owe approximately £670 per adult to credit card companies. That’s 66 per cent of the average wardrobe budget. Also, not only are people spending money they don’t have, they’re using it to buy things they don’t need. Britain throws away 300,000 tons of clothing a year, most of which goes into landfill sites.

People might not realize they are part of the disposable clothing problem because they donate their unwanted clothes to charities. But charity shops can’t sell all those unwanted clothes. Fast fashion goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in and is often too poor quality to recycle; people don’t want to buy it second-hand. Huge quantities end up being thrown away, and a lot of clothes that charities can’t sell are sent abroad, causing even more economic and environmental problems.

However, a different trend is springing up in opposition to consumerism – the ‘buy nothing’ trend. The idea originated in Canada in the early 1990s and then moved to the US, where it became a rejection of the overspending and overconsumption of Black Friday and Cyber Monday during Thanksgiving weekend. On Buy Nothing Day people organize various types of protests and cut up their credit cards. Throughout the year, Buy Nothing groups organize the exchange and repair of items they already own.

The trend has now reached influencers on social media who usually share posts of clothing and make- -up that they recommend for people to buy. Some YouTube stars now encourage their viewers not to buy anything at all for periods as long as a year. Two friends in Canada spent a year working towards buying only food. For the first three months they learned how to live without buying electrical goods, clothes or things for the house. For the next stage, they gave up services, for example haircuts, eating out at restaurants or buying petrol for their cars. In one year, they’d saved $55,000. 

The changes they made meant two fewer cars on the roads, a reduction in plastic and paper packaging and a positive impact on the environment from all the energy saved. If everyone followed a similar plan, the results would be impressive. But even if you can’t manage a full year without going shopping, you can participate in the anti-consumerist movement by refusing to buy things you don’t need. Buy Nothing groups send a clear message to companies that people are no longer willing to accept the environmental and human cost of overconsumption.

source: learnenglish.britishcouncil.org

(Available at: https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/05/the-mystery-of-the-cover-letter – text specially adapted for this test).