Corruption

    People all over the world complain about the corruption of police, government officials, and business leader. Three examples of corruption are:

    • a police officer takes money from a driver so he doesn’t give the driver a ticket for speeding.

    • a public official gives a government contract to a company in which he, or she has a financial interest.

    • a company that wants to do business with a government agency offers public official money, or a gift to choose that company for the job.

    Some people feel that power promotes corruption and that corruption is just an unavoidable part of human nature. But everyone agrees that it’s a terrible problem all over the world.

Adapted from Top Noch.

OXFAM AMERICA

    Oxfam stands for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. It was started in Oxford, England in 1942 in response to the European famine-related issues resulting from the Second World War. Ten other countries worldwide, including the United States and Australia, have started chapters of Oxfam. They make up what is known as Oxfam International.

    Oxfam America is dedicated to creating lasting solutions to hunger, poverty, and social injustice through long-term partnerships with poor communities around the world. As a privately funded organization, we can speak with conviction and integrity as we challenge the structural barriers that foster conflict and human suffering and limit people from gaining the skills, resources, and power to become self-sufficient.

    Oxfam implements various global projects that target areas particularly affected by hunger. The projects focus on developing self-sufficiency of the communities in which they are based, as opposed to merely providing relief in the form of food aid. Oxfam’s projects operate on the communal level, and are developed by evaluating issues causing poverty and hunger in the community and subsequently the possible infrastructure that could end hunger and foster the attainment of self-sufficiency. Examples of projects in which Oxfam America has been or is involved range from a women’s literacy program in India to providing microloans and agriculture education programs for small-scale organic farmers in California.

Adapted from http://students.brown.edu/Hourglass_Cafe/Pages/about.htm

Read the text below and answer the question.

Thought-in-Action Links

    It is important to recognize that methods link thoughts and actions, because teaching is not entirely about one or the other. As a teacher of language, you have thoughts about your subject matter – what language is, what culture is – and about your students – who they are as learners and how it is they learn. You also have thoughts about yourself as a teacher and what you can do to help your students to learn. Many of your thoughts have been formed by your own experience as a language learner. With this awareness, you are able to examine why you do what you do and perhaps choose to think about or do things differently.

    As an example, let us relate an anecdote about a teacher with whom Diane Larsen-Freeman was working some time ago. From her study of methods in Stevick (1980), Heather (not her real name) became interested in how to work with teacher control and student initiative in her teaching. She determined that during her student teaching internship, she would exercise less control of the lesson in order to encourage her students to take more initiative, and have them impose the questions in the classroom, since so often it is the teacher who asks all the questions, not the students.

    However, she felt that the students were not taking the initiative, but she could not see what was wrong. When Diane Larsen Freeman, who was her supervisor, visited her class, she observed the following:

    HEATHER: Juan, ask Anna what she is wearing.

    JÜAN: What are you wearing?

    ANNA: I am wearing a dress.

    HEATHER: Anna, ask Muriel what she is writing.

    ANNA: What are you writing?

    MÜRIEL: I am writing a letter.

    This pattern continued for some time. It was clear to see that Heather had successfully avoided the common problem of the teacher asking all the questions in the class. The teacher was not asking the questions – the students were. However, Heather had not achieved her goal of encouraging student initiative.

(Larsen-Freeman, D. 2000. Adaptado)

                        From Nail bars to car washes: how big

                             is the UK’s slavery problem?

                                                                                                  by Annie Kelly

      Does slavery exist in the UK?

      More than 250 years since the end of the transatlantic slave trade, there are close to 41 million people still trapped in some form of slavery across the world today. Yet nobody really knows the scale and how many victims or perpetrators of this crime there are in Britain.

      The data that has been released is inconsistent. The government believes there are about 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, while earlier this year the Global Slavery Index released a much higher estimate of 136,000.

      Statistics on slavery from the National Crime Agency note the number of people passed on to the government’s national referral mechanism (NRM), the process by which victims of slavery are identified and granted statutory support. While this data gives a good snapshot of what kinds of slavery are most prevalent and who is falling victim to exploiters, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. For every victim identified by the police, there will be many others who are not found and remain under the control of traffickers, pimps and gangmasters.

      There are also many potential victims who don’t agree to go through the mechanism because they don’t trust the authorities, or are too scared to report their traffickers. Between 1 November 2015 and 30 June 2018, the government received notifications of 3,306 potential victims of modern slavery in England and Wales who were not referred to the NRM.

      […]

      The police recorded 3,773 modern slavery offences between June 2017 and June 2018.

      […]

(Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/ oct/18/nail-bars-car-washes-uk-slavery-problem-anti-slavery-day. Access: 20/10/2018)

Read the text and answer question.

      American jazz is a trove of sounds borrowed from such varied sources as American and African folk music, European classical music, and Christian gospel songs. One of the recognizable traits of jazz is its use of improvisation: certain parts of the music are written out and played the same way by various performers, and other improvised parts are created spontaneously during a performance and vary widely from performer to performer.

      The root form of jazz was ragtime, lively songs or rags performed on the piano, and the best-known of the ragtime performers and composers was Scott Joplin. Born in the 1868 to former slaves, Scott Joplin earned his living from a very early age playing the piano in bars around the Mississippi. One of these regular jobs was in the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri. It was there that he began writing the more than 500 compositions that he was to produce, the most famous of which was “The Maple Leaf Rag”.

        (Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL, Deborah Philips Adapted.)