Read the excerpt to answer the question.

“JACK: We must get married at once. There is no time to be lost.

GWENDOLEN: Married, Mr. Worthing?

JACK: Well... surely. You know that I love you, and you let me to believe, Miss Fairfax, that you were not absolutely indifferent to me.

GWENDOLEN: I adore you. But you haven't proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched on.

JACK: Well... may I propose to you now?

GWENDOLEN: I think it would be an admirable opportunity. And to spare you any possible disappointment, Mr. Worthing, I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.” 

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Text CB1A2 

        Currently, the Digital Euro has not been launched — though there are signs that a launch may be coming sooner rather than later. By October 2025, the ECB (European Central Bank) has indicated a second phase of the preparation for the Digital Euro. By then, the ECB will have prepared an outreach plan, procurement standards, and technology providers.

        The Digital Euro has potential downsides, many of them echoed in the other launches of central bank digital currencies. For example, the central bank will become a technology company focused on procurement with central points of failure. This was a breeding ground for corruption for the bureaucrat fortunate enough to make these technical choices in China.

        While the Digital Euro is slated to “coexist” with cash, this also comes when EU (European Union) nations are voting on ending end-to-end encryption (a critical digital privacy tool) and have started to restrict cash with limits being placed on how much you can spend in cash to accelerate its slow demise.

        User privacy is said to be the ECB’s “chief concern” as it has been designing the central bank’s digital currency. Certainly, the ECB is aware of public perception that has negative surveillance, control, and privacy implications in mind. The ECB has been at pains to say that the Digital Euro will “coexist” with cash and that unlike the e-CNY (China’s central bank digital coin) it will not be tied to a “social credit” score or place limits on how money is spent.

        A big part of the ECB’s drive towards the Digital Euro is to compete and pry Europeans away from Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and “stablecoins”.

        Central bank digital currencies are a direct liability of the central bank. Since the central bank has the power to issue currency, this means that the central bank can essentially create “digital euros” if it wishes to. The architecture and data within a central bank digital currency are usually built completely by the central bank supported by private vendors of its choice. In China, the central bank has turned away from a distributed ledger technology to a centralized data store, in which the technical details are pretty scant. Hence, the central bank controls everything, and the system has no external access. 

Internet: <www.forbes.com/sites> (adapted).

Read Text 1 and answer question.

TEXT 1

English Language Teaching in Brazil:

A Gap in Policy, Problems in Practice

    Only three percent of Brazilians are estimated to speak English despite the status of this language as a mandatory subject in grades 10 to 12 of basic education and preferred foreign language in grades 5 to 9. The widespread concept in the Brazilian society that speaking English is beneficial to individuals because it provides access to the globalised world does not seem to be enough to promote the actual learning of the language by the majority of the population, and it is argued here that this fact has to do with a gap in the foreign language teaching policy documents: the 2015 National Education Guidelines and Framework Law (LDB 2015), the Brazilian National Curriculum Parameters for Primary Education (PCN-EF), and the Brazilian National Curriculum Parameters for Secondary Education (PCN-EM). These documents do not prescribe the necessary conditions for English Language Teaching (ELT) to take place effectively, but, instead, provide suggestions for teachers on how to adapt to the status quo, which means focusing on reading to the detriment of the other aspects of the English language due to a number of factors ranging from a lack of resources to a large number of students per class.

    Both PCN-EF (Brazil, 1998) and PCN-EM (Brazil, 2000) present progressive ideas about how a foreign language should be taught in the basic education classroom. Such ideas include a social interactionist view of language, which aligns with contemporary research in second language teaching and means a shift from the traditional grammar-translation method largely employed in Brazilian schools in previous decades. The Parameters also recommend interdisciplinary work, the implementation of cross-curricular themes, formative assessment in addition to summative, a value of students’ prior knowledge and position as critical subjects, and, thus, an approach to teaching as negotiation that aims to educate students for the full exercise of citizenship, which includes the notions of respect for difference and diversity  that can be promoted by the teaching and learning of foreign languages.

    However, the Parameters fail in pointing out the necessary conditions for this teaching and learning process to occur. For example, they acknowledge that reading and writing should be focused on to the detriment of listening and speaking due to the difficulties faced by the teacher in basic education (Brazil, 1998): large classrooms, lack of appropriate resources including class and preparation time for the teacher and opportunities for the students to be exposed to the language outside the classroom, and, in many situations, teachers’ lack of knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, what they should do is to actively propose that a smaller number of students sit in English classes – as it was allowed by LDB 1996 and continues to be so by LDB 2015, that more class and preparation time be granted the teacher, that schools have English resources that students can access to familiarise themselves with the language, and that better teacher education be implemented.

BATISTA, Fernanda. English Language Teaching in Brazil: A Gap in Policy, Problems in Practice. 2020. Disponível em: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1262339.pdf. Acesso em 30/12/2023 Adaptado.

Read Text I and answer question.

Is social media harming teens? A dive into the research cites risks but returns few hard answers 

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine grapples with the questions: Is social media harming teenagers? And what can Congress, the Education Department and parents do about it?

The answers are murky. The authors surveyed hundreds of studies across more than a decade and came to complicated, occasionally contradictory, conclusions. On one hand, they found there isn’t enough population data to specifically blame social media for changes in adolescent health. On the other hand, as shown in study after study cited by the report, social media has the clear potential to hurt the health of teenagers, and in situations where a teenager is already experiencing difficulties like a mental health crisis, social media tends to make it worse.

“There is much we still don’t know, but our report lays out a clear path forward for both pursuing the biggest unanswered questions about youth health and social media, and taking steps that can minimize the risk to young people using social media now,” Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health and chair of the committee behind the report, said in a news release.

According to the report, the ways social media is used seem to make a difference. When a teenager passively scrolls, as opposed to actively posting, that’s connected by many studies to low life satisfaction and feelings of sadness. It may be that showcasing a hobby or an interest on social media doesn’t produce the same harms. But those rates differ by demographic group: Black, non-Hispanic participants in one study reported more negative moods during active social media use, suggesting that the potential benefits of posting on social media are not the same for teenagers of all backgrounds.

In addition, age affects how well certain strategies work. In younger children, a family policy that restricts social media except when it’s actively guided by a parent seems to reduce the risk of problematic use and inappropriate behavior online. But in adolescents, overly restrictive and controlling parental rules, like confiscating a phone for punishment, are often associated with that teenager taking more risks online.

Faced with an urgent need to “create a more transparent industry and a better-informed consumer of social media,” the report calls on companies and regulators to establish international standards, such as clear ways for companies to share data with researchers and accepted best practices to avoid proven harms where possible. It recommends that the International Organization for Standardization – a body that sets global rules in areas such as manufacturing and food safety – be tasked with creating a new system, one that could be used by federal and international agencies to track and evaluate social media companies and the algorithms they build. And it asks for funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other agencies to pay for the sort of large, long-term studies that have in the past identified major public health crises.

Adapted from: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/socialmedia/social-media-harming-teens-dive-research-citesrisks-returns-hard-answ-rcna129490