Questões Militares de Inglês

    A man drove his car into the second floor of a Pennsylvania home on Sunday in what officials say was an "intentional act".

   Charges are pending against the driver after police found a grey vehicle sticking out of the side of the house in the city of Lewistown.

   Officials have not said how exactly the vehicle made its way to the second floor.         "The pictures speak for themselves", a fire official told the BBC.

    Anywhere from one to three people were inside the home at the time of the crash but were not injured, according to Sam Baumgardner, an administrator at the Junction Fire Company, which assisted in the response to the crash.

    The driver was able to climb out onto the roof after the crash and was taken to the hospital with injuries, Mr Baumgardner said.

    He added that the car likely hit the second floor because of a culvert - a tunnel that carries a stream under a road or railway - on the left side of the house.

   The driver "went into the culvert and propelled into the air and landed on the second floor", Mr Baumgardner said.

    In a report, Lewistown police said they had determined through an investigation that the crash was "an intentional act".

   Officials added that the driver will face charges for the crash.

     The BBC has reached out to police for comment.

   The fire department said it took about three hours to remove the car from the second floor.

   "The crew that was on the rescue definitely had to think outside the box," Mr Baumgardner said.

    Rescue crews helped stabilise the house and put a tarp over the hole from the crash because of upcoming storms, the Junction Fire Company said in a post on Facebook.

Internet: BBC News

On the surface, there is little to distinguish the Woolf Social Club from any other hipster hangout in Seoul, South Korea. Customers perch on wooden stools at formica tables, tapping on laptops while they sip their coffee. Records and cds line the walls, soft jazz trickles from speakers. On the white wall above the bar, in big black letters, is the statement: “More dignity, less bullshit”.

It is only on closer inspection that you realise this is more than just another coffee shop. On the mugs are cartoon drawings of Virginia Woolf, an angry wolf roaring from her shirt. A bookshelf contains South Korean feminist novels and works of self-help (titles include “Lessons on Being Unmarried”) alongside “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. On the wall is a poster for an exhibition of feminist art at a nearby gallery.

“I wanted a space for like-minded women to meet and talk,” says Kim Jina, a 47-year-old former advertising executive and politician who founded the café six years ago. Kim was inspired by Woolf’s dictum that in order to write fiction, a woman needed “five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door”. That is, financial independence and a place to think. The café’s casual vibe is deliberate: she wanted to avoid creating barriers to entry for women who were merely curious, rather than fully committed to the movement. Besides, she adds, “If I limited myself to feminist customers, I could never make a living.” 

South Korea, even its trendy capital, is a difficult place to be a woman. The wage gap between the sexes is the highest in the rich world. Traditional expectations about gender roles, beauty standards and the way women should conduct themselves remain pervasive. “Misogyny surrounds you so naturally that you barely even notice it,” says Kim. “I had no role models, so my idea of how a successful woman should be came straight from ‘Sex and the City’.” For much of her 20s and 30s, she spent most of her money on make-up and expensive handbags, partying every weekend and dreaming about meeting her version of Mr Big, the rich, smooth-talking love interest of the show’s main character, Carrie.

“I never worried about misogyny because I thought being sexually attractive was a form of power,” says Kim. “But eventually I realised that men with real power don’t wear make-up and expensive dresses.” Her epiphany came when she was passed over for promotion in favour of a male colleague. “My boss said, ‘He needs it more than you because he has a wife and a child to take care of,’ and I realised that I had been wrong to think that all I needed to do was work hard and be good at my job.” 

Kim’s burgeoning feminism crystallised in the summer of 2016, after a woman was murdered in a public toilet in an upmarket part of Seoul. The killer initially claimed that he had done it because he had been ignored by women. “I lived right around the corner, and I thought: that could have been me,” says Kim. Like many other women, she was upset by media coverage that ignored the misogynist motives for his crime and blamed it entirely on his mental-health problems.

The murder prompted South Korean women to come together, initially in online communities, and discuss how to fight back against sexism. Then they took to the streets. In 2018 there was a series of protests against the widespread practice of recording illegal footage of women by hiding small cameras in public toilets or changing rooms.

Kim founded the Woolf Social Club in 2017. “I thought, we talk to each other on the internet, but it would be good to have a physical space in which to do that,” she says. “If you walk around Seoul, you see all these cafés aimed at couples, where women look pretty and lower their voices. I wanted a space where they could raise them.”

[Fonte: Lena Schipper. “Virginia Woolf is inspiring South Korean feminists”. In: The Economist, 09/05/2022,<http://www.economist.com/1843/2022/05/09/virginia-woolf-is-inspiring-south-korean-feminists>. Adaptado. Data de acesso: 27/08/2023.]

      “It’s a very nice book and very lively, but in the section on ‘Processes’ for example all the exercises are about unusual things for our country. We are a hot country and also have many Muslims. The exercises are about snow, ice, cold mornings, and making wine. I can tell you I can’t do making wine and smoking pot in my country!” (Experienced school teacher from the Ivory Coast, Africa)

      “Previous materials were not based on life in Brazil which is why I don’t think they worked very well …” (Brazilian teacher of English in school)

      “Sir … what is opera?” (Iraqi student in mixed nationality class using materials designed to practise reading narrative)

     The implications of these three quotations are not simply linguistic; rather, they address the problem of appropriate contextual realisation for materials. For the teacher in the Ivory Coast, the materials offered would be outside the cultural experience of his students (possibly even threatening) and thus effectively useless; conversely, for the Brazilian teacher, the choice of Brazilian settings and familiar mores would have clear advantages over distant foreign contexts as they are essentially more motivating. The quote from the Iraqi student suggests that complete unfamiliarity with the notion of opera may reduce the efficacy of the reading exercises, but in this case the student is curious and likely to regard the material as exotic rather than merely alien.