Questões de Vestibular
Sobre interpretação de texto | reading comprehension em inglês
Foram encontradas 5.299 questões
Q1308467
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis on Thursday
delivered some of his most politically provocative
remarks since his papacy began this year, hopping
from his popemobile to walk through a slum in this
city before urging young people to fight against
corruption, a leading grievance behind the huge
street protests that shook dozens of Brazilian cities
in June.
“Do not grow accustomed to evil, but defeat
it,” Francis said at the favela, or slum, of Varginha,
in an area that has commonly been known here as
the Gaza Strip for its gun battles and drug trafficking
in the past. “Do not lose trust, do not allow your
hope to be extinguished,” he added, acknowledging
that it was common for some to “grow disillusioned
with news of corruption.”
By singling out corruption in a folksy visit to a
Brazilian favela on his first trip abroad as pope,
Francis, an Argentine-born Jesuit, emphasized his
aim to refocus the Roman Catholic Church on the
neglected margins of society, especially in Brazil and
other parts of Latin America where the popularity of
evangelical churches has surged among the poor in
recent decades.
In a nod to the Brazilian political authorities
who have warmly welcomed him, Francis also
praised the government’s antipoverty programs and
did not specifically mention the anti-establishment
protests in Brazil. But he did critique Rio de Janeiro’s
so-called pacification project in the city’s slums, in
which security forces assert control over lawless
areas.
“No amount of pacification will be able to last,
nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a
society that ignores, pushes to the margins or
excludes a part of itself,” the pope said in Varginha,
a slum that has recently been subjected to
pacification. In a remark that could resonate in Latin
America and in the United States, which is also
grappling with the widening disparity between the
haves and the have-nots, Francis said that a society
“impoverishes itself” by perpetuating such
inequality.
Care for the poor and marginalized is an
integral part of Catholic teaching, and a concern of
many popes and encyclicals, including those by
Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI. But Francis has
made it a hallmark of his young papacy, telling
journalists in Rome days after his election, “How I
would like a church that is poor and for the poor.”
He has demonstrated that ideal by living relatively
humbly as pope: in a communal guesthouse rather
than the opulent papal apartment, wearing a
pectoral cross of iron instead of gold, flying
commercial. He recently told priests that they should
not drive fancy cars, and he has traveled around Rio
this week in a compact Fiat.
“He is helping to wake people up,” said Natalia
Morais, 21, a nursing student from Minas Gerais
State who traveled to Rio to see the pope as part of World Youth Day, a conference attended by
hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth. “When the
pope talks, political leaders listen, and that’s what’s
needed in Brazil, where our protests are about their
corruption,” Ms. Morais said.
Reaching beyond Brazil, Francis told
Argentines who came here for the conference that
“the church must be taken into the streets” in a
struggle against complacency. “Stir things up, cause
confounding, but do not diminish faith in Jesus
Christ,” he said in Spanish.
In each of Francis’ public appearances, he has
been accorded a rock-star reception. On an
uncommonly cold and rainy morning, hundreds of
residents lined the narrow, muddy sidewalks of the
Varginha favela to glimpse the first pope from the
Americas, who obliged by stopping often to touch
and bless people.
Many onlookers had made their own shirts to
commemorate the event, with a photo of Francis.
Others draped themselves in Brazilian flags and
waved banners bearing his image. Residents darted
in and out of their homes, checking their televisions
and radios to learn the pope’s whereabouts and
calling the information out to their neighbors
standing on wet rooftops to get a better view.
Sônia Curato, 48, a manicurist, said the
pope’s visit was different from that of other leaders.
“Politicians come all the time. They make promises
and leave,” she said. “He is a very simple person.
You can tell that. He has charisma. He speaks to the
people, doesn’t like going around in an armored
car.”
By Simon Romero and Taylor Barnes
Published: July 25, 2013
www.nytimes.com
One of the ways through which Pope Francis
has shown he is not like his predecessors is the fact
that he defends that
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279900
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
In the sentence “Wanting to see the world, he
later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service,”
the underlined phrase can be correctly rewritten as
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279899
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
The expression “Not just on the court, but in
the streets as well” can be correctly rewritten as
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279890
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
Besides being the subject of public fascination
for his crusade against corruption, the Chief Justice
is also known for
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279889
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
The Brazilian tradition, according to Mr.
Barbosa, refers to a period of time in Brazil when
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279888
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
Despite his rude manner, Mr. Barbosa is
praised for some important rulings, like helping to
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279887
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
One of the reasons Mr. Barbosa got very
irritated was the fact that some of the mensalão
defendants
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279886
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
Speaking with journalists recently, the Chief
Justice explained the reason why
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279885
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
One criticism made by Mr. Barbosa was that
judges’ mentality in Brazil, besides being prostatus quo, was also
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279884
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
One of the Chief Justice’s positive actions
the text mentions was
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279883
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
According to the text, Mr. Barbosa’s
eminence could truly be seen when
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279882
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long
viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality.
Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in
billowing robes and wrap each utterance in
grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era
when marquises and dukes held sway from their
vast plantations.
In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned
another justice about whether he would even be on
the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a
former president impeached in 1992. With another
justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief
justice considered his condescending tone, telling
him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a
hired thug.
In one of his most scathing comments, Mr.
Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice,
took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it
is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend
time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes
— contending that the mentality of judges was
“conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well
to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent
interview in his quarters here in the Supreme
Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by
the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak
my mind so much.”
His acknowledged lack of tact
notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a
series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking
rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in
particular — into a newfound political power and the
subject of popular fascination.
The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous
decision upholding the University of Brasília’s
admissions policies aimed at increasing the number
of black and indigenous students, opening the way
for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping
affirmative action laws for higher education.
In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway
as chief justice and president of the panel
overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize
same-sex marriage across the country. And in an
anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the
precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in
the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast
vote-buying scheme.
Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less
pushing the institution to assert its independence,
long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest
of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished
city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked
as a bricklayer.
But his prominence — not just on the court,
but in the streets as well — is so well established
that masks with his face were sold for Carnival,
amateur musicians have composed songs about his
handling of the corruption trial and posted them on
YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told
pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top
choices for president in next year’s elections.
While the protests have subsided since their
height in June, the political tumult they set off
persists. The race for president, once considered a
shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now
up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so
much in the public eye that gossip columnists are
following his romance with a woman in her 20s —
repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a
candidate for anything,” he says.
But the same public glare that has turned
him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While
he has won widespread admiration for his guidance
of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every
other prominent political figure in Brazil, has
recently come under scrutiny. And for someone
accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal
system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on
the defensive.
One report in the Brazilian news media
described how he received about $180,000 in
payments for untaken leaves of absence during his
19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments
are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public
bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an
apartment in Miami through a limited liability
company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on
the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends
that he has done nothing wrong.
In a country where a majority of people now
define themselves as black or of mixed race — but
where blacks remain remarkably rare in the
highest echelons of political institutions and
corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt
manner have elicited both widespread admiration
and a fair amount of resistance.
As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the
capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a
courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the
University of Brasília, the only black student in its
law program at the time. Wanting to see the
world, he later won admission into Brazil’s
diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to
Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the
Baltic Sea.
Sensing that he would not advance much in
the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of
the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr.
Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He
alternated between legal investigations in Brazil
and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English,
French and German, and earning a doctorate in
law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris.
Fascinated by the legal systems of other
countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative
action in the United States. He still voices his
admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the
first black Supreme Court justice in the United
States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years
embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing
inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high
court toward socially liberal rulings.
Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into
Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling
of the trial of political operatives, legislators and
bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption
scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly
allowance, after the regular payments made to
lawmakers in exchange for their votes.
Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the
high court sentenced some of the most powerful
figures in the governing Workers Party to years in
prison for their crimes in the scheme, including
bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political
system in which impunity for politicians has been the
norm.
Now the mensalão trial is entering what could
be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times
been visibly exasperated that defendants who have
already been found guilty and sentenced have
managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed
with other justices over their consideration of a rare
legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at
the high court are examined.
Losing his patience with one prominent
justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve
some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa
publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by
using legalese to prop up certain positions. An
outcry ensued among some who could not stomach
Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that.
“Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?”
asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper
O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was
qualified to preside over the court. “What powers
does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the
chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal
Tribunal?”
Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the
interview, he said some tension was necessary for
the court to function properly. “It was always like
this,” he said, contending that arguments are now
just easier to see because the court’s proceedings
are televised.
Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of
protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed
with the violence of some demonstrators, but he
also said he believed that the street movements
were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.”
“People don’t want to passively stand by and
observe these arrangements of the elite, which were
always the Brazilian tradition,” he said.
When Mr. Barbosa was a teenager, he was
employed as a
Q1264745
Inglês
Texto associado
Considere o texto a seguir para responder
a questão.
Tooth fairy quantum mechanics
The reason I can’t show you a Higgs boson1
is also
the solution to a parental dilemma.
Posted by Jon Butterworth
Sunday 23 December 2012 18.36 GMT, theguardian.com
I do sometimes get asked “If you’ve found a Higgs boson,
can you show me a picture of it?” Unfortunately, the answer
is no. But the reason for this provides a resolution to a severe
parental dilemma, and explains why I am in fact sometimes
the tooth fairy. Bear with me.
I can’t show you something which is definitely the new
boson, but I can show evidence for it, for example in the
picture below. It shows the distribution (black dots) of the
mass you get when you combine the energy and momenta2
of pairs of photons (particles of light) in the ATLAS detector.
The bump shows that there are more of these photon pairs
at masses corresponding to around 125 GeV than would be
expected from the trend. This excess implies the existence
of a particle at about this mass which decays to pairs of
photons.
The bump3
in this plot would not be there unless there
were a new boson (credit, ATLAS experiment and CERN). The
key is that even if I show you a collision event with a pair
of photons which exactly gives the “Higgs mass”, i.e. at the
top of that peak, it is still not possible to be sure that this
exact pair of photons came from a Higgs boson. There may
be several possible ways of producing a set of new particles
from the incoming ones; but if the resulting set is identical,
it is not physically meaningful to say which way occurred.
Now, to the parental dilemma. It is especially acute at this
time of year, but if you have children who are losing their
milk teeth, it is ever-present. Is the tooth fairy real? What
about Father Christmas? Do you spoil the fun or do you lie?
Something in me hates the idea of lying to my kids, and
undermining4
trust. Here’s my way out. Anything which has
the same initial state (tooth) and final state (money) might in
fact be an event in which a tooth fairy was present. To put it
another way, anything which removes the tooth and delivers
money shares such an essential property with a tooth fairy
that it can be said to be one (anything removing both teeth
and money is probably a dentist. Or possibly a mugger5
).
By now, my son doesn’t believe a word of it of course.
But in the early days it was the truth. We managed this
transition without lies, betrayal and tears because actually,
when tiptoeing into the bedroom with a shiny pound coin, I
really am the tooth fairy. I am of course also at the same time
Dad. This seemed to work, and now he’s older, it’s still fun.
It’s not much of stretch to extend this to Father Christmas,
and it also explains why sometimes Father Christmas uses
the same wrapping paper as your parents - he and they are,
in a sense, indistinguishable quantum possibilities for the
delivery process.
(theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2012/dec/23/tooth-fairy-quantum-mechanics Acesso em: 26.08.2013. Adaptado)
Glossário
1Higgs boson: partícula subatômica teórica que ficou conhecida
publicamente após ter sido divulgada como a “partícula de Deus”.
Sua existência é associada a pesquisas acerca da origem do universo.
(topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/higgs_boson/index.html
Acesso em 02.10.2013. Adaptado)
2momenta: plural de momentum – conceito físico associado à
quantidade de movimento de uma partícula.
3bump: choque ou elevação.
4undermine: tornar algo gradativamente mais fraco, especialmente
a confiança ou autoridade de alguém.
5mugger: assaltante.
O autor do texto afirma que
Q1264744
Inglês
Texto associado
Considere o texto a seguir para responder
a questão.
Tooth fairy quantum mechanics
The reason I can’t show you a Higgs boson1
is also
the solution to a parental dilemma.
Posted by Jon Butterworth
Sunday 23 December 2012 18.36 GMT, theguardian.com
I do sometimes get asked “If you’ve found a Higgs boson,
can you show me a picture of it?” Unfortunately, the answer
is no. But the reason for this provides a resolution to a severe
parental dilemma, and explains why I am in fact sometimes
the tooth fairy. Bear with me.
I can’t show you something which is definitely the new
boson, but I can show evidence for it, for example in the
picture below. It shows the distribution (black dots) of the
mass you get when you combine the energy and momenta2
of pairs of photons (particles of light) in the ATLAS detector.
The bump shows that there are more of these photon pairs
at masses corresponding to around 125 GeV than would be
expected from the trend. This excess implies the existence
of a particle at about this mass which decays to pairs of
photons.
The bump3
in this plot would not be there unless there
were a new boson (credit, ATLAS experiment and CERN). The
key is that even if I show you a collision event with a pair
of photons which exactly gives the “Higgs mass”, i.e. at the
top of that peak, it is still not possible to be sure that this
exact pair of photons came from a Higgs boson. There may
be several possible ways of producing a set of new particles
from the incoming ones; but if the resulting set is identical,
it is not physically meaningful to say which way occurred.
Now, to the parental dilemma. It is especially acute at this
time of year, but if you have children who are losing their
milk teeth, it is ever-present. Is the tooth fairy real? What
about Father Christmas? Do you spoil the fun or do you lie?
Something in me hates the idea of lying to my kids, and
undermining4
trust. Here’s my way out. Anything which has
the same initial state (tooth) and final state (money) might in
fact be an event in which a tooth fairy was present. To put it
another way, anything which removes the tooth and delivers
money shares such an essential property with a tooth fairy
that it can be said to be one (anything removing both teeth
and money is probably a dentist. Or possibly a mugger5
).
By now, my son doesn’t believe a word of it of course.
But in the early days it was the truth. We managed this
transition without lies, betrayal and tears because actually,
when tiptoeing into the bedroom with a shiny pound coin, I
really am the tooth fairy. I am of course also at the same time
Dad. This seemed to work, and now he’s older, it’s still fun.
It’s not much of stretch to extend this to Father Christmas,
and it also explains why sometimes Father Christmas uses
the same wrapping paper as your parents - he and they are,
in a sense, indistinguishable quantum possibilities for the
delivery process.
(theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2012/dec/23/tooth-fairy-quantum-mechanics Acesso em: 26.08.2013. Adaptado)
Glossário
1Higgs boson: partícula subatômica teórica que ficou conhecida
publicamente após ter sido divulgada como a “partícula de Deus”.
Sua existência é associada a pesquisas acerca da origem do universo.
(topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/higgs_boson/index.html
Acesso em 02.10.2013. Adaptado)
2momenta: plural de momentum – conceito físico associado à
quantidade de movimento de uma partícula.
3bump: choque ou elevação.
4undermine: tornar algo gradativamente mais fraco, especialmente
a confiança ou autoridade de alguém.
5mugger: assaltante.
Segundo as indicações do texto, o gráfico apresentado
Q1264743
Inglês
Texto associado
Considere o texto a seguir para responder
a questão.
Tooth fairy quantum mechanics
The reason I can’t show you a Higgs boson1
is also
the solution to a parental dilemma.
Posted by Jon Butterworth
Sunday 23 December 2012 18.36 GMT, theguardian.com
I do sometimes get asked “If you’ve found a Higgs boson,
can you show me a picture of it?” Unfortunately, the answer
is no. But the reason for this provides a resolution to a severe
parental dilemma, and explains why I am in fact sometimes
the tooth fairy. Bear with me.
I can’t show you something which is definitely the new
boson, but I can show evidence for it, for example in the
picture below. It shows the distribution (black dots) of the
mass you get when you combine the energy and momenta2
of pairs of photons (particles of light) in the ATLAS detector.
The bump shows that there are more of these photon pairs
at masses corresponding to around 125 GeV than would be
expected from the trend. This excess implies the existence
of a particle at about this mass which decays to pairs of
photons.
The bump3
in this plot would not be there unless there
were a new boson (credit, ATLAS experiment and CERN). The
key is that even if I show you a collision event with a pair
of photons which exactly gives the “Higgs mass”, i.e. at the
top of that peak, it is still not possible to be sure that this
exact pair of photons came from a Higgs boson. There may
be several possible ways of producing a set of new particles
from the incoming ones; but if the resulting set is identical,
it is not physically meaningful to say which way occurred.
Now, to the parental dilemma. It is especially acute at this
time of year, but if you have children who are losing their
milk teeth, it is ever-present. Is the tooth fairy real? What
about Father Christmas? Do you spoil the fun or do you lie?
Something in me hates the idea of lying to my kids, and
undermining4
trust. Here’s my way out. Anything which has
the same initial state (tooth) and final state (money) might in
fact be an event in which a tooth fairy was present. To put it
another way, anything which removes the tooth and delivers
money shares such an essential property with a tooth fairy
that it can be said to be one (anything removing both teeth
and money is probably a dentist. Or possibly a mugger5
).
By now, my son doesn’t believe a word of it of course.
But in the early days it was the truth. We managed this
transition without lies, betrayal and tears because actually,
when tiptoeing into the bedroom with a shiny pound coin, I
really am the tooth fairy. I am of course also at the same time
Dad. This seemed to work, and now he’s older, it’s still fun.
It’s not much of stretch to extend this to Father Christmas,
and it also explains why sometimes Father Christmas uses
the same wrapping paper as your parents - he and they are,
in a sense, indistinguishable quantum possibilities for the
delivery process.
(theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2012/dec/23/tooth-fairy-quantum-mechanics Acesso em: 26.08.2013. Adaptado)
Glossário
1Higgs boson: partícula subatômica teórica que ficou conhecida
publicamente após ter sido divulgada como a “partícula de Deus”.
Sua existência é associada a pesquisas acerca da origem do universo.
(topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/higgs_boson/index.html
Acesso em 02.10.2013. Adaptado)
2momenta: plural de momentum – conceito físico associado à
quantidade de movimento de uma partícula.
3bump: choque ou elevação.
4undermine: tornar algo gradativamente mais fraco, especialmente
a confiança ou autoridade de alguém.
5mugger: assaltante.
De acordo com o texto, é correto afirmar que o bóson de Higgs
Ano: 2013
Banca:
PUC-MINAS
Órgão:
PUC-MINAS
Prova:
PUC-MINAS - 2013 - PUC-MINAS - Prova - Medicina |
Q1263485
Inglês
Texto associado
Why the Internet is so addictive
"Checking Facebook should only take a minute." Those are the famous last words of countless people every
day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos or commenting on Instagrammed sushi
lunches. That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. The Internet’s omnipresence
and lack of limits encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the self-control to turn it off.
"The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a
cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."
Humans are social creatures. Therefore, people enjoy the social information available via email and the Web.
The main reason the Internet is so addictive is that it lacks boundaries between tasks, Stafford said.
Someone may set out to "research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, and then wind up trying to
find out what ever happened to Depeche Mode," Stafford said, referring to the music band. Studies suggest
willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted. Because the Internet is always
"on," staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person's self-control.
For those who want to loosen the grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.
Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan
ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web
surfing, Stafford said.
(Adapted from: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/stories/why-the-internet-is-so-addictive)
If you want to gain control over your time, you should
Ano: 2013
Banca:
PUC-MINAS
Órgão:
PUC-MINAS
Prova:
PUC-MINAS - 2013 - PUC-MINAS - Prova - Medicina |
Q1263484
Inglês
Texto associado
Why the Internet is so addictive
"Checking Facebook should only take a minute." Those are the famous last words of countless people every
day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos or commenting on Instagrammed sushi
lunches. That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. The Internet’s omnipresence
and lack of limits encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the self-control to turn it off.
"The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a
cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."
Humans are social creatures. Therefore, people enjoy the social information available via email and the Web.
The main reason the Internet is so addictive is that it lacks boundaries between tasks, Stafford said.
Someone may set out to "research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, and then wind up trying to
find out what ever happened to Depeche Mode," Stafford said, referring to the music band. Studies suggest
willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted. Because the Internet is always
"on," staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person's self-control.
For those who want to loosen the grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.
Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan
ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web
surfing, Stafford said.
(Adapted from: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/stories/why-the-internet-is-so-addictive)
The word It in “It can be strengthened” (paragraph 3) refers to
Ano: 2013
Banca:
PUC-MINAS
Órgão:
PUC-MINAS
Prova:
PUC-MINAS - 2013 - PUC-MINAS - Prova - Medicina |
Q1263483
Inglês
Texto associado
Why the Internet is so addictive
"Checking Facebook should only take a minute." Those are the famous last words of countless people every
day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos or commenting on Instagrammed sushi
lunches. That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. The Internet’s omnipresence
and lack of limits encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the self-control to turn it off.
"The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a
cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."
Humans are social creatures. Therefore, people enjoy the social information available via email and the Web.
The main reason the Internet is so addictive is that it lacks boundaries between tasks, Stafford said.
Someone may set out to "research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, and then wind up trying to
find out what ever happened to Depeche Mode," Stafford said, referring to the music band. Studies suggest
willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted. Because the Internet is always
"on," staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person's self-control.
For those who want to loosen the grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.
Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan
ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web
surfing, Stafford said.
(Adapted from: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/stories/why-the-internet-is-so-addictive)
According to Tom Stafford, the main reason the Internet is so addictive is that
Ano: 2013
Banca:
PUC-MINAS
Órgão:
PUC-MINAS
Prova:
PUC-MINAS - 2013 - PUC-MINAS - Prova - Medicina |
Q1263482
Inglês
Texto associado
Why the Internet is so addictive
"Checking Facebook should only take a minute." Those are the famous last words of countless people every
day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos or commenting on Instagrammed sushi
lunches. That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. The Internet’s omnipresence
and lack of limits encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the self-control to turn it off.
"The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a
cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."
Humans are social creatures. Therefore, people enjoy the social information available via email and the Web.
The main reason the Internet is so addictive is that it lacks boundaries between tasks, Stafford said.
Someone may set out to "research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, and then wind up trying to
find out what ever happened to Depeche Mode," Stafford said, referring to the music band. Studies suggest
willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted. Because the Internet is always
"on," staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person's self-control.
For those who want to loosen the grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.
Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan
ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web
surfing, Stafford said.
(Adapted from: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/stories/why-the-internet-is-so-addictive)
The word Therefore in: “Therefore, people enjoy the social information…” (paragraph 2) indicates
Ano: 2013
Banca:
PUC-MINAS
Órgão:
PUC-MINAS
Prova:
PUC-MINAS - 2013 - PUC-MINAS - Prova - Medicina |
Q1263481
Inglês
Texto associado
Why the Internet is so addictive
"Checking Facebook should only take a minute." Those are the famous last words of countless people every
day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos or commenting on Instagrammed sushi
lunches. That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. The Internet’s omnipresence
and lack of limits encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the self-control to turn it off.
"The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a
cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."
Humans are social creatures. Therefore, people enjoy the social information available via email and the Web.
The main reason the Internet is so addictive is that it lacks boundaries between tasks, Stafford said.
Someone may set out to "research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, and then wind up trying to
find out what ever happened to Depeche Mode," Stafford said, referring to the music band. Studies suggest
willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted. Because the Internet is always
"on," staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person's self-control.
For those who want to loosen the grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.
Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan
ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web
surfing, Stafford said.
(Adapted from: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/stories/why-the-internet-is-so-addictive)
Why do people usually lose track of time when they are surfing the net?
Conheça nossos planos