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Structure of education in Singapore

The complete control and management of Singapore’s education is in the hands of the Ministry of Education (MOE). With continuous endeavour from MOE, today Singapore can be considered to have a strong and well-reputed education system. As per recent study Singapore is ranked fourth in terms of World’s Best Education System.

The preschools are run by the private sector, including religious bodies, community foundations, business groups, etc. However, every preschool need to register itself with the Singapore Ministry of Education before being functional.

After completion of 6 years of primary education, students have to appear for a Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE). All those students who passed the exam are admitted in a secondary level course, which is usually completed in 4-5 years. It is similar to attending seventh grade through tenth grade in the American education system.

After completion of the secondary education, the students need to appear in Singaporean GCE ‘O’ Level exam. Based on the merit in that exam, students proceed to pre-university education, which is similar to attending eleventh grade and twelfth grade as per the American education system. At this level students can opt for a wide range of subjects from varied academic areas covering Humanities, Arts and Languages, Sciences and Mathematics streams.

www.singaporeeducation.info/Education-System/ Structure-of-Education

Dutch government bans phones in schools The Dutch government has announced a ban ______01 mobile phones, tablets, and smartwatches in classrooms starting ______02 January 1, 2024.

The aim is to reduce distractions ______03 lessons and promote better concentration and studying opportunities for students. ______04, devices

_______________05 if they are specifically required for digital skills lessons, for medical reasons, or students with disabilities.

Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf ______06 that ______07 mobile phones are a significant part of ______08 lives, they are not suitable for the classroom, and scientific research ______09 this view.

The ban is the result of an agreement between the ministry, schools, and related organizations. Schools have the flexibility to implement the ban in their way, but if the desired outcomes ______10 achieved by the summer of 2024, legal rules ______11 enforced.

Source: https://www.newsinlevels.com/products/dutch government-bans-phones-in-schools-level-3/. 

Use the following text to answer questions

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Homework: one word that makes the heart of many a parent sink and is guaranteed, at any given time, to be causing rows in homes around the world. The homework debate has raged for decades. How much homework should kids get? How involved should parents be? And does it really matter if it doesn't get done? Recent years have seen a swell of support for ditching homework altogether; more than one teacher has gone semi-viral for sharing a nohomework policy that prioritizes family time, outdoor play, and early bedtimes. And some schools have adopted no-homework programs, encouraging students to enjoy their evening free time and in some cases lengthening the school day to provide more classroom instruction.

Unbeknownst to many, there is an unofficial homework standard, the "10-minute rule" that was first proposed by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper and is supported by the National PTA and the National Education Association. It's simple: a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. (First graders do 10 minutes of homework each night; second graders do 20 minutes; third graders do 30 minutes, and so on.)

Cooper is responsible for the most comprehensive research on homework to date. His 2006 meta-analysis, published in the Review of Educational Research, found evidence that students who did homework performed better in school. However, the correlation was stronger for students in seventh through 12th grade. In earlier grades, the relationship between homework and performance was weak. But Cooper's analysis shows correlation, not causation. It begs the question: Does homework lead to achievement, or do high achievers simply do more homework? Undoubtedly, some kids are less likely to kick up a stink about doing homework than others. Others actually want to do homework. The point being, they're all different. 

Why women make way less than men do in more religious places

By Stephanie Pappas

   Why is there a persistent wage gap between men and women? Turns out, religion may play a big role in the disparity.

   New research finds that the wage gap is 8 percentage points wider in the five most religious states than in the five most secular, with women making 18% less than men in the least religious states and 26% less in the most religious. What's more, the gender gap is projected to vanish in 28 years in the most secular states, compared with a stunning 109 years in the most religious. "If they're in a religious community, our children are not going to know a world in which they're paid equitably," said Traci Sitzmann, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Denver. "It's a little bit scary." 

Religion and wages

  Sitzmann and her colleague Elizabeth Campbell, an assistant professor of work and organizations at the University of Minnesota, were interested in exploring the impacts of religiosity on workforce issues. They started with a global view. Using data from 140 countries, they compared the likelihood of citizens answering "yes" to the question, "Is religion important in your daily life?" with the gender wage gap in those countries as of 2013, the most recent global data available. They found a striking association: The more religious a country, the greater the wage gap. In nations where more than 95% or more people said religion was important in their daily lives, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, women earned around 46% as much as men.

   In countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important to them in daily life, such as Sweden and Estonia, women averaged around 75% of men's wages. The United States had moderately high religiosity and women in the U.S. earned 66 cents for every dollar men earned, Sitzmann told Live Science.

  The effect held true for all major world religions, Sitzmann said. It didn't matter if most believers in a country were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or adherants to a folk religion. The wage gap was still greater in countries where religion played a major role in daily life.

   The researchers then turned to Gallup survey data on religious service attendance and the importance of religion in daily life in the 50 U.S. states. In the U.S. data, the researchers looked only at full-time wages so as not to skew the results due to women working fewer hours.

   They again found that the more religious the state, the greater the wage gap. (Mississippi, Alabama, Utah, South Dakota and South Carolina were the most religious states; Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Nevada were the least.) The researchers found that religiosity explained 17% of the variability in the gender wage gap between states. To ensure that the wider economy or levels of conservatism weren’t responsible for the difference, the researchers then looked at year-over-year data between 2008 and 2018 and found that the association between religion and wages still held. The gender gap is shrinking over time in the U.S., they found, but it is shrinking faster in secular states compared with religious ones. At current rates, it will take more than a century for the gap to close in the most religious states.

   According to the workplace data analysis company PayScale, women make 81 cents for every dollar men make as of 2020. This analysis compares median salaries for men and women, and does not control for factors like seniority, years experience and education, all of which can be impacted by gender discrimination and gender role expectations.

The pathway to a wage gap

   Sitzmann and Campbell found three reasons for this difference in wages between secular and religious regions. The more religious a country or state, the more that society differentiated the roles of men and women. In other words, women in more religious societies are expected to put family first. The researchers measured this by looking at how many babies women have, how many women work at all, access to abortion and family-friendly work policies. In more religious societies, women have more children, participate less in the workforce, have less access both to abortion and to policies that help balance work with family. 

  Religious societies are also more likely to sexually objectify women, the researchers found. They measured this by looking at regional Google Trends for the search terms "pornography" and "rape." Both were correlated with religiosity, and both were correlated with the gender wage gap.

   Finally, religious societies are also less likely to promote or accept women in leadership positions. "We've got the Pope saying, 'the door is closed, women are not allowed to be leaders in the church,'" Sitzmann said, referring to Pope Francis' 2013 statement on female priests in the Catholic Church. "That sets the stage for a very strong norm."

   She and Campbell found that in more religious societies, women have less representation in politics and in organizational leadership. They also have lower educational attainment and less legal equality.

Closing the gap

  Finally, the researchers conducted experiments to confirm that it was indeed religion, and not some closely related concept like conservatism, that explained the results. They set up an online game in which 91 participants, about half women and half men, acted as managers who had to allocate wages to employees based on performance reviews. All of the participants saw the same performance reviews, but in some cases the employee was named Patricia Anderson and in others was called Michael Taylor.

   Before seeing the performance reviews, some participants saw a description of the mock company they were working for that described it as faith-based. Others saw a description that focused on the company's dedication to communication and community.

   Those who were primed to believe they were working for a religious company allocated 3% more to the male employee compared with the female employee. In contrast, those who thought the organization was secular allocated 6% more to the female employee.

   But there was a way to reverse the inequality. When the researchers told people in the mock religious company that one of the company values was that women needed to be involved, and that the company had a strict anti-sexual-harassment policy, it wiped out the gender wage gap, according to their research paper published Oct. 27 in the Academy of Management Journal.

   This was a heartening result, Sitzmann said, because it suggests that simply being aware of expectations for gender equality will help make people behave more equitably. 

Adapted from: https://www.livescience.com/religious-states-wider-gender-pay-gap.html

Answers the question according to the text below.

TEXT I

Instructions: answer the question based on the following text. 

1 The Swansea-based scientist spent years piecing together ____ ancient DNA 2 puzzle that suggests hunting by humans caused this giant seabird's demise.

3 Dr Thomas studied bone and tissue samples from 41 museum specimens

4 during a PhD at both Bangor and Copenhagen University.

5 The findings paint a picture ____ how vulnerable even the most common 

6 species are to human exploitation.

7 Storybook seabird

8 About 80cm (2ft 7in) tall, the stubby-winged and bulbous-billed great auks

9 used to be found all across the north Atlantic - from North America through

10 Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and the UK.

11 "Being flightless, they were always targeted ____ local people for food and for 12 their feathers," says Dr Thomas.

13 "But around 1500, when European seamen discovered the rich fishing

14 grounds off Newfoundland, hunting intensified."

15 By about 1850, the great auk was extinct; the last two known specimens were 16 hunted down by fishermen on Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland.

17 The songbird obsession that became an extinction crisis

18 A third of tropical plants face extinction

19 Five ways to climate proof the world

20 One of these signatures might be a lack of genetic diversity, suggesting

21 individuals were inbreeding and the species, as a whole, was becoming

22 vulnerable to disease or environmental change.

23 "But their genetic diversity was very high - all but two sequences we found 

24 were very different," Dr Thomas said.

25 In fact, the genetic timeline Dr Thomas and her colleagues were able to create 26 - published in the journal eLife - showed that, at the time the intensive great 27 auk hunting began, the species was doing "really well".

28 "They weren't at risk of extinction at all," said Dr Thomas.

29 "It emphasizes how vulnerable even the widespread and abundant species

30 are to this intensive, localized pressure."

Source (adapted): https://www.bbc.com/news/scienceenvironment-50563953.

Leia o texto abaixo e responda as questões de 21 a 24.

Mary is a nice woman. She is a nurse and works in a big hospital. She works at night on weekends. Mary has two young children and they are very intelligent. Their names are "Jack" and "Julie". Jack is nine years old and Julie is eleven years old. Jack likes soccer and Julie loves movies. Jack wants to be a soccer player and Julie wants to be a movie star.

Mary likes to be with her children when she isn't working - they play board games together. Mary's family is very happy, especially when Jake, Mary's husband, is at home with them. Jake usually travels a lot and visits different places - he is a truck driver.