TEXT II

The four-thousand-year-old computer

In 1901, a group of divers excavating an ancient Roman shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, off the southern coast of Greece, found a mysterious object - a lump of calcified stone that contained within it several gearwheels welded together after years under the sea. The 2,000-year-old object, no bigger than a modern laptop, is now regarded as the world's oldest computer, devised to predict solar eclipses and, according to recent findings, calculate the timing of the ancient Olympics. Following the efforts of an international team of scientists, the mysteries of the Antikythera Mechanism are uncovered, revealing surprising and awe-inspiring details of the object that continues to mystify.

(From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq)

                                                 Text 2  

                                          What’s in a name?

                                                                                        Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1989)

The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self.

                                                                                                    - James Baldwin, 1961

… blood, darky, Tar baby, Kaffir, shine… moor, blackamoor, Jim Crow, spook… quadroon, meriney, red bone, high yellow… Mammy, porch monkey, home, homeboy, George… spearchucker, Leroy, Smokey…mouli, buck, Ethiopian, brother, sistah…

                                                                                                              - Trey Ellis, 1989

      I had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Elli’s essay, “Remember My Name,” in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989). But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the bynames of “the race” (“the race” or “our people” being the terms my parents used in polite or reverential discourse, “jigaboo” or “nigger” more commonly used in anger, jest, or pure disgust), it was: “George”. Now the events of that very brief exchange return to my mind so vividly that I wonder why I had forgotten it.

      My father and I were walking home at dusk from his second job. He “moonlighted” as a janitor in the evenings for the telephone company. Every day, but Saturday, he would come home at 3:30 from his regular job at the paper Mill, wash up, eat supper, then at 4:30 head downtown to his second job. He used to make jokes frequently about a union official who moonlighted. I never got the joke, but he and his friends thought it was hilarious. All I knew was that my family always ate well, that my brother and I had new clothes to wear, and that all of the white people in Piedmont, West Virginia, treated my parents with an odd mixture of resentment and respect that even we understood at the time had something directly to do with a small but certain measure of financial security.

      He had left a little early that evening because I was with him and I had to be in bed early. I could not have been more than five or six, and we had stopped off at the Cut-Rate Drug Store (where no black person in town but my father could sit down to eat, and eat off real plates with real silverware) so that I could buy some caramel ice cream, two scoops in a wafer cone, please, which I was busy licking when Mr. Wilson walked by.

      Mr. Wilson was a very quiet man, whose stony, brooding, silent manner seemed designed to scare off any overtures of friendship, even from white people. He was Irish as was one-third of our village (another third being Italian), the more affluent among whom sent their children to “Catholic School” across the bridge in Maryland. He had white straight hair, like my Uncle Joe, whom he uncannily resembled, and he carried a black worn metal lunch pail, the kind that Riley carried on the television show. My father always spoke to him, and for reasons that we never did understand, he always spoke to my father.

      “Hello, Mr. Wilson,” I heard my father say.

      “Hello, George.”  

I stopped licking my ice cream cone, and asked my Dad in a loud voice why Mr. Wilson had called him “George.”

      “Doesn’t he know your name, Daddy? Why don’t you tell him your name? Your name isn’t George.”

      For a moment I tried to think of who Mr. Wilson was mixing Pop up with. But we didn’t have any Georges among the colored people in Piedmont; nor were there colored Georges living in the neighboring towns and working at the Mill.

      “Tell him your name, Daddy.”

      “He knows my name, boy,” my father said after a long pause. “He calls all colored people George.”

      A long silence ensued. It was “one of those things”, as my Mom would put it. Even then, that early, I knew when I was in the presence of “one of those things”, one of those things that provided a glimpse, through a rent curtain, at another world that we could not affect but that affected us. There would be a painful moment of silence, and you would wait for it to give way to a discussion of a black superstar such as Sugar Ray or Jackie Robinson.

      “Nobody hits better in a clutch than Jackie Robinson.”

      “That’s right. Nobody.”

      I never again looked Mr. Wilson in the eye.  

                                                              Text 1

             Luis Suárez joins anti-racism calls after Dani Alves banana incident

      The Barcelona defender Dani Alves has sparked a social media campaign against racism in football as support flooded in from fellow professionals for his decision to eat a banana thrown at him by an opposition fan.

      Luis Suárez, Neymar, Hulk, Mario Balotelli and Sergio Agüero were among those who posted pictures of themselves taking bites out of bananas in tribute to Alves' actions in his side's La Liga match at Villarreal on Sunday.

      The Fifa president Joseph Blatter has branded the abuse directed at Alves an "outrage" and promised zero tolerance towards discrimination at the World Cup, while Villarreal took swift action by identifying the culprit and handing him a lifetime stadium ban.

      Alves' response to the banana being thrown on to the pitch in front of him as he prepared to take a corner was to nonchalantly pick it up, peel it and take a bite before continuing with the game. The 30-yearold, who has been the victim of racist abuse before during his time in La Liga, said: "You need to take these situations with a dose of humour."

      Players across Europe paid homage on Twitter and Instagram, including Suárez, who served an eight-match ban for racially abusing Patrice Evra.

      Alves's Barça and Brazil team-mate Neymar led the way after posting a picture on Instagram of himself holding a banana, while writing "We are all monkeys". Balotelli, Milan's former Manchester City striker, posted a picture of himself in a similar pose.

      Suárez posted a picture on Twitter of himself and Liverpool team-mate Philippe Coutinho taking bites out of bananas, along with the words: "#SayNoToRacism #WeAreAllMonkeys."

      (...)

      Barça gave their player their "complete support and solidarity" and thanked Villarreal for their "immediate condemnation" of the incident. Villarreal later revealed they had, with the help of fans, found out who the culprit was, had withdrawn his season ticket and banned him from the El Madrigal stadium for life.

Disponível em:<http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/apr/29/luis-suarez-anti-racism-dani-alvesbanana> . Acesso em 29 abr.2014 (texto adaptado)  

Investigators trying to find out what happened to a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared en route to Beijing on Saturday morning were examining the causes of plane crashes: mechanical failure, pilot error, bad weather. But the discovery that two of the passengers were carrying stolen passports also raised the possibility of criminal violence.

(Adapted from “Passport Theft adds mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Jet”)

GLOSSARY

raised – aumentou, ampliou 

     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) 

PART 1: READING COMPREHENSION

                  The War at Home: The Struggle for Veterans to Find Jobs 

      In today's tough and competitive job market, it can be challenging for any adult to land a decent job. Though education can definitely improve outcomes, sometimes it's not just abont the degree. Experience can also play a major role in helping people find jobs. Yet in some cases, if you do not have the right kind of experience, this may be of little help. Just ask one of the many college-educated military veterans who serve their country only to return to find a job market that will treat them as rookies.

      Army veteran John Lee Dumas said he had zero anxieties about finding a job after graduating college and had been told that his military experience would give him a leg up on other candidates. But things did not turn out that way. 

      "I quickly found out that I was lumped together with recent college grads for entry-level positions, and that an employee that had two years' experience at a job in a similar industry was considered way more qualified than I was despite my four years as an officer in the army", Dumas said.

      When Dumas did find work, he said it was difficult to acclimate to the civilian Office environment.

      "I often found that my peers and above had a hard time dealing with my direct approach and attitude about tackling problems head on, often asking for forgiveness rather than permission", he said.

      One issue is that veterans are too modest when it comes to stating their accomplishments in the military. 

      "For some reason, I've had veterans not tell me about their awards and honors, but it should all be listed - from commander' s coins to medals of honor," Hurwitz said.

      Navy veteran Tom Graves, who has a career in world force development helping companies understand the benefits of hiring skilled and experienced military veterans, agreed.

                                                             (Adapted from http://www.onlinecollege.org)