American Students Test Well in Problem Solving, but Trail Foreign Counterparts 

      Fifteen-year-olds in the United States scored above the average of those in the developed world on exams assessing problem-solving skills, but they trailed several countries in Asia and Europe as well as Canada, according to International standardized tests results released on Tuesday.

      The American students who took the problem-solving tests in 2012, the first time they were administered, did better on these exams than on reading, math and Science tests, suggesting that students in the United States are better able to apply knowledge to real-life situations than perform straightforward academic tasks.

      Still, students who took the problem-solving tests in countries including Singapore, South Korea, Japan, several provinces of China, Canada, Australia, Finland and Britain all outperformed American students. 

      "The good news is that problem solving still remains a relatively strong suit for American students," said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group focused on improving high schools. "The challenge is that a lot of other nations are now developing this and even moving ahead. So where we used to, in an earlier era, dominate in what we called the deeper learning skills — Creative thinking, criticai thinking and the ability to solve problems — in terms of producing the workers that are increasingly needed in this area, other nations are coming on strong and in some cases surpassing us ." 

      The new problem-solving exams were administered to a subset of 15-year-olds in 28 countries who sat for the Program for International Student Assessment, a set of tests every three years commonly known as PISA and given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group whose members include the world's wealthiest nations. Almost 1,275 American students took the exams. 

      Critics of the rankings on International tests have tended to characterize the high performance of Asian countries in particular as demonstrating the rote learning of facts and formulas. But the problem-solving results showed that students in the highest-performing nations were also able to think flexibly. Even on Interactive tasks, the American students' strength, all the Asian countries that participated in this round of exams outperformed the United States. 

      "To understand how to navigate a complex problem and exercise abstract reasoning is actually a very strong point for the Asian countries," said Francesco Avvisati, an analyst on the PISA team at the O.E.C.D.

                                                                     (Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com) 

                                         Brazil’s Rolezinhos – The Kids Are All Right

     Mall owners and shopkeepers have reasons to be cautious. A few rolezinhos have led to muggings and robberies. But most do not end in Itaquera-like chaos: the word’s true meaning is closer to “little outing”. And theories that rolezeiros are class warriors or favela dwellers tired of the country’s veiled racism are not correct. “Their battle cry is not ‘Less oppression!’” says Renato Barreiros, who has directed a documentary about them. “It’s ‘More Adidas!’”

    The point of a rolezinho is “to hang out, chill, buy nice things, meet people”, explains Vinicius Andrade, a 17-year-old from Capão Redondo, a favela in western São Paulo. He has taken part in 18 big rolezinhos and helped organise a few, drawing some of his 89,000 Facebook followers. His 15-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Oliveira, a rolezeiro sweetheart with 94,000 fans of her own on the social network, says that shopping centres make good meeting places because they are safe – an important consideration in a crime-ridden city. There are few other public venues for kids, especially in poorer neighbourhoods.

     As well as air conditioning, shopping centres also confer something no open-air space can: status. Rolezeiros enjoy walking around in a branded T-shirt and bermudas, with a pair of 400- reais ($170) shades perched on a baseball cap. Vinicius confesses to spending 800-1,000 reais a month on clothes and accessories, most of what he makes as a helper at a local Adventist church. Just 8% of Itaquera shoppers enjoy a monthly income in excess of 2,780 reais. Some rolezeiros support their flashy lifestyle by reselling outmoded attire to poorer neighbours.

    Shopkeepers in the local malls have mixed feelings about the gatherings. On the one hand, the youngsters make ideal clients: they often pay cash and can spend 2,000-3,000 reais in one go. On the other, larger groups can scare away customers.

Adapted from http://www.economist.com

Based on the text below, answer the question.

Facebook deserted by millions of users in biggest markets 

Facebook has lost millions of users per month in its biggest markets. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK. Studies suggest that its expansion in the US, UK and other major European countries has peaked. In the last month, the world's largest social network has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm Socialbakers. In the UK, 1.4m fewer users visited in March, a fali of 4.5%. Users are also turning off in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook is extremely popular. 

Alternative social networks have seen surges in popularity with younger people. Instagram, the photo-sharing site, got 30m new users in the 18 months before Facebook bought the business. Path, the mobile phone-based social network founded by former Facebook employee Dave Morin, which only allows its users to have 150 friends, is gaining 1m users a week. 

Facebook is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up to 6% in the last month to 70m, according to Socialbakers, whose Information is used by Facebook advertisers. India has seen a 4% rise to 64m - still only a fraction of the country's population, so there is room for more growth. 

As Facebook itself has warned, the time spent on its pages from those sitting in front of personal computers is decreasing fast because people now prefer to use their smartphones and tablets. Although smartphone minutes have doubled in a year, to 69 a month, that growth may not compensate for dwindling desktop usage. 

Facebook will tell investors about its performance for the quarter. Wall Street expects revenues of about $1.44bn, an increase from $1.06bn a year ago. Shareholders will want to know how fast the number of mobile Facebook users is growing, and whether advertising revenues are increasing at the same rate. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has created a series of new initiatives designed to appeal to smartphone users. One initiative, Facebook Home, is software that can be downloaded onto Android phones to feed news and photos from friends - and advertising - directly to the owner's locked home screen.

(Adapted from http://www.guardian.com.uk)

Leia o texto para responder à  questão.

                                  What is organized crime?

      Organized crime was characterised by the United Nations, in 1994, as: “group organization to commit crime; hierarchical links or personal relationships which permit leaders to control the group: violence, intimidation and corruption used to earn profits or control territories or markets; laundering of illicit proceeds both in furtherance of criminal activity and to infiltrate the legitimate economy; the potential for expansion into any new activities and beyond national borders; and cooperation with other organized transnational criminal groups.” 

       It is increasingly global. Although links between, for example, mafia groups in Italy and the USA have existed for decades, new and rapid means of communication have facilitated the development of international networks. Some build on shared linguistic or cultural ties, such as a network trafficking drugs and human organs, which links criminal gangs in Mozambique, Portugal, Brazil, Pakistan, Dubai and South Africa. Others bring together much less likely groups, such as those trafficking arms, drugs and people between South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia, or those linking the Russian mafia with Colombian cocaine cartels or North American criminal gangs with the Japanese Yakuza. Trafficked commodities may pass from group to group along the supply chain; for instance heroin in Italy has traditionally been produced in Afghanistan, transported by Turks, distributed by Albanians, and sold by Italians.

Organized crime exploits profit opportunities wherever they arise. Globalization of financial markets, with free movement of goods and capital, has facilitated smuggling of counterfeit goods (in part a reflection of the creation of global brands), internet fraud, and money-laundering. On the other hand, organized crime also takes advantage of the barriers to free movement of people across national borders and the laws against non-medicinal use of narcotics: accordingly it earns vast profits in smuggling migrants and psychoactive drugs. Briquet and Favarel have identified deregulation and the “rolling back of the state” in some countries as creating lacunae that have been occupied by profiteers. The political changes in Europe in the late 1980s fuelled the growth in criminal networks, often involving former law enforcement officers. Failed states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sierra Leone, have provided further opportunities as criminal gangs smuggle arms in and commodities out, for example diamonds, gold, and rare earth metals, often generating violence against those involved in the trade and in the surrounding communities. Finally, there are a few states, such as the Democratic Republic of Korea and Burma and Guinea-Bissau (once described as a narco-state) where politicians have been alleged to have played an active role in international crime.

       Organized criminal gangs have strong incentives. Compared with legitimate producers, they have lower costs of production due to the ability to disregard quality and safety standards, tax obligations, minimum wages or employee benefits. Once established, they may threaten or use violence to eliminate competitors, and can obtain favourable treatment by regulatory authorities either through bribes or threats.

                                                                               (www.globalizationandhealth.com. Adaptado)