O Significado do Sabbath

Prévia do material em texto

14
Questão 1
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
Which of the following is most supported by the information in the article?
a) The sabbath, as we know it today, is inherently connected to the subdivision of months into weeks.
b) It would be more natural to have a monthly day of rest instead of a weekly day of rest.
c) A weekly day of rest is an ancient concept that has no meaning in the modern world.
d) Though unnatural, a seven-day week is the most practical way to divide up a year.
e) In the ancient world, using the appearance of the moon and the sun to structure time made
it impossible to establish a sabbath day.
Gabarito:
A
Resolução:
A alternativa que confirma as informações do texto é a que afirma que o sabá está inseparavelmente
ligado à subdivisão de meses em semanas, como lemos em: "Months and years are natural ways of
structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the sun. But the seven day
week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest".
Questão 2
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
With respect to the Greeks and Romans, the author most likely believes which of the following?
a) The Greeks and Romans rejected the idea that a government or religion should designate a day of
rest.
b) The Greek and Roman rejection of the Jewish sabbath was an example of their deep-rooted ant-
-semitism.
c) The Greeks and Romans believed that a Jewish character flaw was the reason for the existence of
the weekly sabbath.
d) The Greek and Roman civilizations would have been even more developed if they had adopted
many of the principles of Jewish culture.
e) Their rejection of the sabbath was the reason the Greek and Roman civilizations disappeared.
Gabarito:
C
Resolução:
Segundo o texto, os gregos e romanos escreveram que os judeus mantinham o sabá por serem
preguiçosos, ou seja, acreditavam que uma falha de caráter comum aos judeus era a razão para a
existência do sabbath semanal.
Questão 3
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. Thethe law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
According to the third paragraph,
a) since the 1980s Brazilian engineers have been leaving the country and few are left for the work
needed.
b) Brazilian GDP is not big enough for all the infrastructure investments needed in the next 20 years.
c) the value of Brazil’s infrastructure is way below that of countries similar to it in economic
importance.
d) urban development in Brazil has been over its planned budget for many years in a row.
e) most infrastructure in Brazil is outdated because it was built around one century ago.
Gabarito:
C
Resolução:
De acordo com o que lemos no 3º parágrafo do texto, "The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the
total value of Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%", o valor da
infraestrutura no Brasil está bem abaixo do valor em países com a mesma importância econômica.
Questão 13
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggestairports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The fifth paragraph, as a whole, points out that
a) in order to be effective, ports should be entirely managed by private initiative.
b) private investment can be very effective in building and improving a country’s infrastructure.
c) telecom firms can be managed by private corporations as well as by government-owned
enterprises.
d) oil prospecting is too large and too strategic to be left in the hands of private investment only.
e) government-owned ports can be leased to private corporations so as to bring the country good
profit.
Gabarito:
B
Resolução:
Resumidamente, o 5º parágrafo ressalta que o investimento privado pode ser muito eficaz na
construção e aperfeiçoamento da infraestrutura de um país, aludindo comparativamente ao momento
brasileiro atual e à era Fernando Henrique, marcada por privatizações.
Questão 14
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil becamea commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
In the sentence fragment from the fifth paragraph – But in the past decade its operator... – the word
its refers to
a) Wilson & Sons.
b) equipment.
c) capacity.
d) customers.
e) the port in Salvador.
Gabarito:
E
Resolução:
Para acertar esta questão de referência, era preciso identificar que no trecho em foco,"But in the past
decade its operator..." (Mas na década passada, sua operadora) a palavra "its" (sua) refere-se a "the
port in Salvador" (o porto de Salvador).
Questão 15
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plansto build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The sixth paragraph states that, in the last ten years, there has been a tendency towards
a) halting the number of concessions for public ports to be operated privately.
b) requiring a carefully-controlled environmental licensing process for private projects.
c) only auctioning infrastructure projects that are environmentally friendly.
d) allowing mining companies to build railroads as needed for cargo shipment to ports.
e) granting concessions to the highest bidder, regardless of final project costs.
Gabarito:
A
Resolução:
O sexto parágrafo afirma que, nos últimos dez anos, marcados pela era Lula, tem havido uma
tendência em relação à paralização do número de consessões para os portos públicos serem
operados por empresas privadas. Do texto "But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been
few infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from public ports, the
ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private ports except those intended mainly for
the owners’ own cargo".
Questão 16
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economiesaverage 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The seventh paragraph leads the reader to conclude that
a) the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC) is still being carried out without private capital as
originally planned.
b) roads and railways cannot be efficiently built by public administrations alone unless they are aided
by private enterprise administration.
c) only public money can give farming and mining communities the access they need, within costs
they can afford, to ports.
d) the initial project of President Lula’s administration to do without private investment in
infrastructure didn’t work out as planned.
e) railways are one of the most expensive kinds of infrastructure to build and that is why they are
often late and over budget.
Gabarito:
D
Resolução:
Confirma-se pelo trecho do 7º parágrafo "At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s
infrastructure without private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted
public construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were intended to give
farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the results have been disappointing", do
qual podemos concluir que o projeto inicial de administração do presidente Lula, de dispensar o
investimento privado para suprir a infraestrutura, não teve o êxito esperado.
Questão 17
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government isat last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
As regards Brazilian airports, the text states in the eighth paragraph that
a) they are quickly being remodeled to receive fans arriving for the World Cup in 2014.
b) most projects to remodel them are well over budget and won’t be completed in time.
c) most will be privately-run by the time the football World Cup happens in 2014.
d) only the important ones will be auctioned by the government before 2014.
e) they are poorly run by the government-owned company in charge of them.
Gabarito:
E
Resolução:
Como lemos no 8º parágrafo "Infraero, the state-owned company that runs them, was meant to be
getting them ready for the extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence", ou seja, afirma-se no
texto que os aeroportos brasileiros são mal administrados pela Infraero, a empresa responsável por
eles.
Questão 18
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contractsin public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
As regards infrastructure auctioning as mentioned in the ninth paragraph, the current Brazilian
President, Dilma Rousseff,
a) has decided to fight lobbying groups that are against some of it.
b) is basically following on the footsteps of her predecessor, President Lula.
c) picked a big fight with Brazilian Congress, in order to privatize roads and railways.
d) seems to support wishes expressed by the dockworkers’ unions in most of Brazil.
e) will turn some 150 privately-run ports back to public administration.
Gabarito:
A
Resolução:
Como lemos no texto "Earlier this year she picked the biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports
bill through Congress against lobbying from powerful vested interests", o que confirma que, no que se
refere ao leilão de infraestrutura, a atual presidente brasileira decidiu combater grupos lobistas
contrários a alguns dos leilões.
Questão 19
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still notbeen settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The sentence from the tenth paragraph – Rather than enforcing the law that allows such terminals to
use their own workers, the government summoned the management to Brasília for some
arm-twisting. – illustrates the fact that
a) the government will not carry out their part in infrastructure projects in time.
b) investing in port projects can be risky due to unexpected government interference.
c) projects can take much more time to complete than originally planned.
d) building private terminals within public-owned ports can be too expensive.
e) cost and time overruns are more common in public than in private ports.
Gabarito:
B
Resolução:
O trecho mencionado no 10º parágrafo, em foco na questão, "Rather than enforcing the law that
allows such terminals to use their own workers, the government summoned the management to
Brasília for some arm-twisting" (Ao invés de cumprir a lei que permite que esses terminais utilizem
seus próprios trabalhadores, o governo convocou a gestão para Brasília para uma chave de braço)
ilustra o fato de que investir em projetos portuários pode ser arriscado devido à inesperada
interferência do governo.
Questão 20
The Songs of Distant Earth
Nobody knows how big the universe is. Does it have an end, or does it go on forever? Is there more
than one universe? The distances in space are so great that they are measured in light-years, and
who knows how many stars and planets lie beyond the reach of the eyes and ears of our science?
These stories are full of the mysteries of the universe. Why do the Tibetan lamas want to find out the
nine billion names of God? What is the terrible secret discovered by scientists working on the Moon?
On a far distant planet, under a different sun, Shervane knows he must cross the Wall of Darkness,
even if madness lies on its other side. Bill Cross, at home on Earth, hears friendly voices in his mind;
he thinks he has drunk too much whisky and does not understand the warning coming from the planet
Thaar five hundred light-years away.
And on the planet Thalassa, Lora watches the starship Magellan as it flies in from outer space,
bringing with it love and pain and dreams – the sweet sad songs of distant Earth…
CLARKE. The Songs of Distant Earth. Introduction, 3rd ed. Unigraf, 2001.
Mark the correct alternative(s) according to the text.
I. The author states that no person is aware of the size of the universe.
II. The author asks if somebody has additional information about the number of visible stars and
planets that exist in the universe.
III. The author inquired about the Tibetan lamas' unwillingness of learning about the paltry number of
names that God is usually known.
IV. The author asks about the appalling secret found by experts in science who work on the Moon.
V. The author requests contemptuous information about the simplistic explanations of the universe.
a) Only III is correct.
b) Only I and IV are correct.
c) Only II, III and IV are correct.
d) All the alternatives are correct.
e) All the alternatives are false.
Gabarito:
B
Resolução:
I. Correta. O autor realmente afirma que nenhuma pessoa está ciente do tamanho do universo.
II. Incorreta. Dentre as perguntas feitas pelo autor ao leitor, não figura pergunta sobre se alguém tem
mais informações sobre o número de estrelas visíveis e planetas que existem no universo.
III. Incorreta. A vontade de aprender sobre o número de nomes que Deus é uma característica dos
lamas tibetanos, e não a falta desta vontade.
IV. Correta. O autor pergunta sobre o segredo terrível encontrado por especialistas em ciência que
trabalham na Lua.
V. Incorreta. O autor não tem uma postura desdenhosa ao dirigir as questões aos leitores.interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
At the end of paragraph 3, the sentence "It’s when we make space for the things that are important
but not urgent" most likely refers to which of the following?
a) The fast pace of modern society has made the sabbath more important than ever for our spiritual
and physical health.
b) The sabbath encourages us to disregard certain matters that normally would demand
our immediate attention.
c) Normally, things we consider urgent are, in reality, almost always unimportant.
d) Without the sabbath to support and protect it, religion would become unimportant in modern
society.
e) The more people neglect the sabbath, the more important it becomes.
Gabarito:
B
Resolução:
No final do parágrafo 3, a oração "It’s when we make space for the things that are important but not
urgent" refere-se ao fato de que o sabá nos incentiva a desconsiderar certos assuntos que
normalmente exigiriam nossa atenção imediata, como mensagens de texto, e-mails, etc.
Questão 4
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
With respect to the author’s conception of the sabbath, which of the following is most supported by
the information in the article?
a) The sabbath’s only function is to impose limits on people.
b) The refusal to observe limits was the main factor that destroyed the Greek and Roman civilizations.
c) A rigid observation of the sabbath would make environmental regulations dealing with carbon
consumption unnecessary.
d) A worldwide sabbath, with restrictions on the use of vehicles, could have an important impact on
carbon consumption.
e) Only by understanding the idea of limits can people make sure that environmental devastation will
never happen.
Gabarito:
D
Resolução:
Segundo o texto, um sabá mundial, com restrição ao uso de veículos, poderia ter um impacto
importante no consumo de carbono, conforme se lê em: "A day without cars and planes would go a
long way to cutting the carbon consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology". 
Questão 5
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberationfrom other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
In paragraph 5, the article most likely mentions time and space in order to
a) highlight an essential similarity between the sabbath and parks.
b) show how both the sabbath and parks have been misunderstood and neglected in recent years.
c) explain why ideas of wealth, power and morality are not applicable to the sabbath or to parks.
d) emphasize a subtle difference between the purpose of the sabbath and that of parks.
e) illustrate just two of the many ways that people can work together to strengthen the idea
of community.
Gabarito:
A
Resolução:
O autor menciona tempo e espaço para destacar uma similaridade entre o sabá e os parques: o sabá
está para o tempo assim como os parques estão para o espaço; algo precioso que ninguém pode criar
ou possuir sozinho: "It is to time what parks are to space: something precious that we share on equal
terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own". 
Questão 6
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 when we make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
At the end of paragraph 6, "This" in the sentence "This was, and remains, a fallacy" most likely refers
to the belief that
a) respect for individual initiative and freedom of choice motivated Britain’s deregulation
and privatisation of the national Sunday sabbath.
b) the British people would not observe the sabbath unless the law forced them to do so.
c) only Sunday should be the day reserved exclusively for national reflection and human interaction.
d) eliminating the restrictions normally associated with the sabbath would have a positive impact on
the lives of all the British people.
e) when given freedom of choice, people never select the most beneficial option.
Gabarito:
D
Resolução:
"This", na frase "This was, and remains, a fallacy", refere-se à crença de que eliminar as restrições
normalmente associadas com o sabá teria um impacto positivo na vida de todos os britânicos.
Conforme o texto: "The assumption was that everyone would benefit because we could all decide for
ourselves how to spend the day. This was, and remains, a fallacy". 
Questão 7
The Sabbath: a Day of Collective Rest
1 The idea of a weekly day of collective rest was unprecedented in the ancient world. Months and
years
 are natural ways of structuring time, based respectively on the appearance of the moon and the
sun. But
 the seven day week corresponds to nothing in nature; nor does a day of rest.
2 The Greeks and Romans could not understand the sabbath at all. They wrote that the Jews kept
it
 because they were lazy. The interesting fact is that within a relatively short space of time after
making
 that judgement, Greece, and later Rome, declined and fell. Without institutionalised rest,
civilisations, like
 individuals, eventually suffer from burnout.
3 Originally, the sabbath was conceived as a way of limiting slavery. On one day a week, masters
could
 not make their servants work. For orthodox Jews today the sabbath is a liberation from other
kinds of
 slavery. Imagine a day without texts, tweets, emails or phone calls, without television,
computers or
 electronic games, a day without the pressures of a consumer society, without cars, traffic,
planes, noise
 and pollution, a day dedicated to family, community, study and collective expressions of
gratitude. It’s
 whenwe make space for the things that are important but not urgent.
4 The significance of the sabbath is varied. It introduces into a culture in the most vivid way the
idea of
 limits. We can’t produce, consume and deplete our resources constantly with no constraints and
no
 thought for future generations. A day without cars and planes would go a long way to cutting the
carbon
 consumption that threatens the earth’s ecology. A failure to understand the idea of limit has
brought
 about environmental devastation almost everywhere Homo sapiens has set foot.
5 Moreover, the sabbath renews social capital. It bonds people into communities in way not
structured
 by transactions of wealth or power. It is to time what parks are to space: something precious
that we
 share on equal terms and that none of us could create or possess on our own.
6 Britain used to have its own sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatized. Holy
 days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption
was that
 everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This
was, and
 remains, a fallacy.
7 Societies need civic time when we cultivate the relationships that constitute the third realm that
is
 neither the market nor the state, and that in effect means sabbath, whether or not it carries
religious
 connotations. A once-a-week sabbatical that is public, not private, rest would renew the social
fabric, the
 families and communities that sustain our liberal democratic freedom today.
SACKS, Jonathan. Prospect, August 2013. Adapted.
With respect to the sabbath, which of the following is not supported by the information in the article?
a) The sabbath occupies an area in which commercial and governmental interests do
not predominate.
b) A rich person and a poor person may get equal benefit from the sabbath.
c) The sabbath should be observed collectively, that is, as a community activity.
d) Maintaining a sabbath can help to keep important parts of society healthy.
e) Without a sabbath, liberal democracy is destined to fail.
Gabarito:
E
Resolução:
A informação não apoiada pelo artigo é que sem o sabá a democracia liberal estaria destinada ao
fracasso.
Questão 8
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during theforthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The core issue discussed in the article is:
a) Brazilian government should use public funds to build more airports, roads, and railways.
b) Soya output in Brazil is now larger than that of the United States.
c) Private ports work much more efficiently than public-owned ones.
d) Brazil needs a lot of private investment to overcome its infrastructure problems.
e) Santos and Paranaguá are too far south to handle soya exports.
Gabarito:
D
Resolução:
O texto trata centralmente da necessidade que o Brasil apresenta de investimentos privados para
superar seus problemas de infraestrutura. Embora a questão apareça ao longo de todo o texto, fica
mais evidente no seguinte trecho do último parágrafo "The good news, says Mr. Savaris, is that the
government is at last beginning to understand that it must either reduce the risks for private
investors or raise their returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again".
Questão 9
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The metaphor developed in the first paragraph – a journey back in time – is linked to the fact that
a) both Santos and Paranaguá are ports used more than a century ago to receive the immigrants to
Brazil.
b) most roads in Brazil were built around the middle of the 20th century and little more was done
afterwards.
c) it was only in the 1990s that the Brazilian government began to privatize part of its infrastructure.
d) inflation was so high in the 1980s that the Brazilian government stopped developing new projects
for roads.
e) there is a major contrast between the farms producing the crops and the outlets used for their
export.
Gabarito:
E
Resolução:
A metáfora desenvolvida no primeiro parágrafo, "a journey back in time" (uma viagem de volta no
tempo), está relacionada ao fato de que há um grande contraste entre as fazendas de cultivo e os
portos utilizados para a sua exportação.
Questão 10
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solvingit.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
Expressions used in the article such as – cumbersome environmental-licensing process (4th
paragraph), the hassle of environmental licensing (6th paragraph), all that is missing is the federal
government’s permission... but there is no guarantee (5th paragraph) – clearly show a bias pointing at
the position of The Economist magazine
a) against government interference in private initiative.
b) towards favoring soya exports from the United States.
c) for the Brazilian government of the 1990s.
d) in relation to the privatization of some Brazilian airports.
e) of praise towards the planned auctions of some ports and toll roads.
Gabarito:
A
Resolução:
Expressões como "cumbersome environmental-licensing process" (complicado processo de
licenciamento ambiental), "the hassle of environmental licensing" (o incômodo de licenciamento
ambiental), "all that is missing is the federal government’s permission... but there is no guarantee"
(tudo o que está faltando é a permissão do governo federal ... mas não há garantia) mostram
claramente uma tendência referente à revista The Economist contrária à interferência do governo na
iniciativa privada.
Questão 11
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value oftheir soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing the law that allows such terminals to use their own workers, the
government summoned the management to Brasília for some arm-twisting. In
August Embraport agreed to take the union members “on a trial basis”.
11
Given such regulatory and execution risks, there are unlikely to be many takers
for either rail or port projects as currently conceived, says Bruno Savaris, an
infrastructure analyst at Credit Suisse. He predicts that at most a third of the
planned investments will be auctioned in the next three years: airports, a few
simple port projects and the best toll roads. That is far short of what Brazil needs.
The good news, says Mr Savaris, is that the government is at last beginning to
understand that it must either reduce the risks for private investors or raise their
returns. Private know-how and money will be vital to get Brazil moving again.
Available at: . Adapted.
The second paragraph indicates that the Chinese business Sunrise Group decided to cancel its
purchase of soya from Brazil because
a) it would pay a higher price than it could pay for American soya.
b) the soya they had bought couldn’t be shipped within the expected time.
c) the Brazilian product becomes too expensive because it is shipped by road.
d) it takes so long for the product to get there that most of it is spoiled on the trip.
e) they wanted it to be shipped from northern,rather than southern ports.
Gabarito:
B
Resolução:
A empresa chinesa em questão decidiu cancelar sua compra de soja do Brasil porque a soja
encomendada não pôde ser enviada dentro do prazo esperado. Como lemos no texto, "In March
Sunrise Group, China’s biggest soya trader, cancelled an order for 2m tonnes of Brazilian soya after
repeated delays".
Questão 12
The road to hell
1
Bringing crops from one of the futuristic new farms in Brazil’s central and northern
plains to foreign markets means taking a journey back in time. Loaded onto
lorries, most are driven almost 2,000 km south on narrow, potholed roads to the
ports of Santos and Paranaguá. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they were
used to bring in immigrants and ship out the coffee grown in the fertile states of
São Paulo and Paraná, but now they are overwhelmed. Thanks to a record harvest
this year, Brazil became the world’s largest soya producer, overtaking the United
States. The queue of lorries waiting to enter Santos sometimes stretched to 40
km.
2
No part of that journey makes sense. Brazil has too few crop silos, so lorries are
used for storage as well as transport, causing a crush at ports after harvest.
Produce from so far north should probably not be travelling to southern ports at
all. Freight by road costs twice as much as by rail and four times as much as by
water. Brazilian farmers pay 25% or more of the value of their soya to bring it to
port; their competitors in Iowa just 9%. The bottleneck at ports pushes costs
higher still. It also puts off customers. In March Sunrise Group, China’s biggest
soya trader, cancelled an order for 2 m tonnes of Brazilian soya after repeated
delays.
3
All of Brazil’s infrastructure is decrepit. The World Economic Forum ranks it at
114th out of 148 countries. After a spate of railway-building at the turn of the 20th
century, and road- and dam-building 50 years later, little was added or even
maintained. In the 1980s infrastructure was a casualty of slowing growth and
spiralling inflation. Unable to find jobs, engineers emigrated or retrained.
Government stopped planning for the long term. According to Contas Abertas, a
public-spending watchdog, only a fifth of federal money budgeted for urban
transport in the past decade was actually spent. Just 1.5% of Brazil’s GDP goes on
infrastructure investment from all sources, both public and private. The long-run
global average is 3.8%. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates the total value of
Brazil’s infrastructure at 16% of GDP. Other big economies average 71%. To catch
up, Brazil would have to triple its annual infrastructure spending for the next 20
years.
4
Moreover, it may be getting poor value from what little it does invest because so
much goes on the wrong things. A cumbersome environmental-licensing process
pushes up costs and causes delays. Expensive studies are required before
construction on big projects can start and then again at various stages along the
way and at the end. Farmers and manufacturers spend heavily on lorries because
road transport is their only option. But that is working around the problem, not
solving it.
5
In the 1990s Mr Cardoso’s government privatised state-owned oil, energy and
telecoms firms. It allowed private operators to lease terminals in public ports and
to build their own new ports. Imports were booming as the economy opened up,
so container terminals were a priority. The one at the public port in Bahia’s
capital, Salvador, is an example of the transformation wrought by private money
and management. Its customers used to rate it Brazil’s worst port, with a draft too
shallow for big ships and a quay so short that even smaller vessels had to unload
a bit at a time. But in the past decade its operator, Wilson & Sons, spent 260 m
reais on replacing equipment, lengthening the quay and deepening the draft.
Capacity has doubled. Land access will improve, too, once an almost finished
expressway opens. Paranaguá is spending 400 m reais from its own revenues on
replacing outdated equipment, but without private money it cannot expand
enough to end the queues to dock. It has drawn up detailed plans to build a new
terminal and two new quays, and identified 20 dockside areas that could be
leased to new operators, which would bring in 1.6 billion reais of private
investment. All that is
missing is the federal government’s permission. It hopes to get it next year, but
there is no guarantee.
6
Firms that want to build their own infrastructure, such as mining companies,
which need dedicated railways and ports, can generally build at will in Brazil,
though they still face the hassle of environmental licensing. If the government
wants to hand a project to the private sector it will hold an auction, granting the
concession to the highest bidder, or sometimes the applicant who promises the
lowest user charges. But since Lula came to power in 2003 there have been few
infrastructure auctions of any kind. In recent years, under heavy lobbying from
public ports, the ports regulator stopped granting operating licences to private
ports except those intended mainly for the owners’ own
cargo. As a result, during a decade in which Brazil became a commodity-exporting
powerhouse, its bulk-cargo terminals hardly expanded at all.
7
At first Lula’s government planned to upgrade Brazil’s infrastructure without
private help. In 2007 the president announced a collection of long-mooted public
construction projects, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC). Many were
intended to give farming and mining regions access to alternative ports. But the
results have been disappointing. Two-thirds of the biggest projects are late and
over budget. The trans-north-eastern railway is only half-built and its cost has
doubled. The route of the east-west integration railway, which would cross Bahia,
has still not been settled. The northern stretch of the BR-163, a trunk road built in
the 1970s, was waiting so long to be paved that locals started calling it the
“endless road”. Most of it is still waiting.
8
What has got things moving is the prospect of disgrace during the forthcoming big
sporting events. Brazil’s terrible airports will be the first thing most foreign
football fans see when they arrive for next year’s World Cup. Infraero, the state-
owned company that runs them, was meant to be getting them ready for the
extra traffic, but it is a byword for incompetence. Between 2007 and 2010 it
managed to spend just 800 m of the 3 billion reais it was supposed to invest. In
desperation, the government last year leased three of the biggest airports to
private operators.
9
That seemed to break a bigger logjam. First more airport auctions were mooted;
then, some months later, Ms Rousseff announced that 7,500 km of toll roads and
10,000 km of railways were to be auctioned too. Earlier this year she picked the
biggest fight of her presidency, pushing a ports bill through Congress against
lobbying from powerful vested interests. The new law enables private ports once
again to handle third-party cargo and allows them to hire their own staff, rather
than having to use casual labour from the dockworkers’ unions that have a
monopoly in public ports. Ms Rousseff also promised to auction some entirely new
projects and to re-tender around 150 contracts in public terminals whose
concessions had expired.
10
Would-be investors in port projects are hanging back because of the high chances
of cost overruns and long delays. Two newly built private terminals at Santos that
together cost more than 4 billion reais illustrate the risks. Both took years to get
off the ground and years more to build. Both were finished earlier this year but
remained idle for months. Brasil Terminal Portuário, a private terminal within the
public port, is still waiting for the government to dredge its access channel. At
Embraport, which is outside the public-port area, union members from Santos
blocked road access and boarded any ships that tried to dock. Rather than
enforcing