Questões de Vestibular de Inglês - Vocabulário | Vocabulary

   Of the 125 people arrested over offenses that law enforcement officials described as related to the coronavirus pandemic, 113 were black or Hispanic. Of the 374 summonses from March 16 to May 5, a vast majority — 300 — were given to black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

   Videos of some of the arrests are hard to watch. In one posted to Facebook last week, a group of some six police officers are seen tackling a black woman in a subway station as heryoung child looks on. “She's got a baby with her!” a bystander shouts. Police officials told The Daily News the woman had refused to comply when officers directed her to put the mask she was wearing over her nose and mouth.

   Contrast that with photographs across social media showing crowds of sun-seekers packed into parks in wealthy, whiter areas of the city, lounging undisturbed as police officers hand out masks.

   So it is obvious that the city needs a different approach to enforcing public health measures during the pandemic. Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to understand this, and he has promised to hire 2,300 people to serve as social distancing “ambassadors.”

   Hopefully, the mayor will think bigger.

  One promising idea , promoted by City Councilman Brad Lander and others, is to build quickly a kind of “public health corps" to enforce social-distancing measures.

  In this approach, specially trained civilians could fan out across the neighborhoods and parks, helping with pedestrian traffic control and politely encouraging New Yorkers entering parks to protect one another by wearing masks and keeping their distance. Police Department school safety agents, who are not armed, could help. Such a program could also provide muchneeded employment for young people, especially with New York's summer jobs program, which serves people 14 to 24, threatened by budget cuts.

   Another method to help social-distancing efforts may be the community-based groups that have been effective in reducing gun violence in some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.

   The Police Department would play only a minimal role in this approach, stepping in to help with crowd control, for example, something it does extremely well.

   Without a significant course correction, the department's role in the pandemic may look more and more like stop-and-frisk, the policing tactic that led to the harassment of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, most of them black and Hispanic, while rarely touching white New Yorkers. Mr. de Blasio has scoffed at the comparison, though it's not clear why.

   Aggressive police enforcement of socialdistancing measures is nearly certain to harm the health and dignity of the city's black and Hispanic residents. 

   It could also diminish respect for the Police Department. Which is why it makes sense that the city's largest police union has said that its members want little to do with social-distancing enforcement. “The N.Y.P.D. needs to get cops out of the socialdistancing-enforcement business altogether,” Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement on May 4. On this issue, Mr. Lynch gets it.

   New York is facing a public health crisis, not a spike in crime. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are already suffering disproportionately from the coronavirus. They don't need more policing. They need more help. 

Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/opinion/nypdcoronavirus-arrests-nyc.html. Accessed May 18,2020. 

Leia o texto para responder a questão.

Modern-day slavery: an explainer

Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

   About 150 years after most countries banned slavery – Brazil was the last to abolish its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, in 1888 – millions of men, women and children are still enslaved. Contemporary slavery takes many forms, from women forced into prostitution, to child slavery in agriculture supply chains or whole families working for nothing to pay off generational debts. Slavery thrives on every continent and in almost every country. Forced labour, people trafficking, debt bondage and child marriage are all forms of modern-day slavery that affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

  Slavery is prohibited under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude: slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

  Definitions of modern-day slavery are mainly taken from the 1956 UN supplementary convention, which says: “debt bondage, serfdom, forced marriage and the delivery of a child for the exploitation of that child are all slavery-like practices and require criminalisation and abolishment”. The 1930 Forced Labour Convention defines forced labour as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”. As contemporary systems of slavery have evolved, new definitions, including trafficking and distinguishing child slavery from child labour, have developed. 

  Due to its illegality, data on modern-day slavery is difficult to collate. The UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that about 21 million people are in forced labour at any point in time. The ILO says this estimate includes trafficking and other forms of modern slavery. The only exceptions are trafficking for organ removal, forced marriage and adoption, unless the last two practices result in forced labour. The ILO calculates that 90% of the 21 million are exploited by individuals or companies, while 10% are forced to work by the state, rebel military groups, or in prisons under conditions that violate ILO standards. Sexual exploitation accounts for 22% of slaves.

    Remember the good old days, when you could have a heated-yet-enjoyable debate with your friends about things that didn’t matter that much — times when you could be a true fan of the Manchester United soccer team when you didn’t come from the city of Manchester?

    How things have changed.

    Now disagreements feel deadly serious. Like when your colleague pronounces that wearing a face mask in public is a threat to his liberty. Or when you see that one of your friends has just tweeted that, actually, all lives matter. Before you know it, you’re feeling angry and forming harsh new judgments about your colleagues and friends. Let’s take a collective pause and breathe: there are some ways we can all try to have more civil disagreements in this febrile age of culture wars.

1. ‘Coupling’ and ‘decoupling’

    The first is to consider how inclined people are to ‘couple’ or ‘decouple’ topics involving wider political and social factors. Swedish data analyst John Nerst has used the terms to describe the contrasting ways in which people approach contentious issues. Those of us more inclined to ‘couple’ see them as inextricably related to a broader matrix of factors, whereas those more predisposed to ‘decouple’ prefer to consider an issue in isolation. To take a crude example, a decoupler might consider in isolation the question of whether a vaccine provides a degree of immunity to a virus; a coupler, by contrast, would immediately see the issue as inextricably entangled in a mesh of factors, such as pharmaceutical industry power and parental choice.

2.____________________

    Most of us are deeply committed to our beliefs, especially concerning moral and social issues, such that when we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we often choose to dismiss those facts, rather than update our beliefs.

    A study at Arizona State University, U.S., analysed more than 100,000 comments on a forum where users post their views on an issue and invite others to persuade them to change their mind. The researchers found that regardless of the kind of topic, people were more likely to change their mind when confronted with more evidence-based arguments. “Our work may suggest that while attitude change is hard-won, providing facts, statistics and citations for one’s arguments can convince people to change their minds,” they concluded.

3. Just be nicer?

    Finally, it’s easier said than done, but let’s all try to be more respectful of and attentive to each other’s positions. We should do this not just for virtuous reasons, but because the more we create that kind of a climate, the more open-minded and intellectually flexible we will all be inclined to be. And then hopefully, collectively, we can start having more constructive disagreements — even in our present very difficult times.