Choose the correct pronoun to complete the sentence:
When my husband was in England we emailed __________ every day.
Can I help reduce energy consumption?
We have an important role to play right now. Energy conservation helps a lot in preserving our planet’s rich natural resources and promoting a healthy environment. Here you will find simple things that you can do to help reduce energy consumption.
· Turn–off non-essential lights and appliances. The electricity generated by fossil fuels for a single home puts more carbon dioxide into the air than two average cars.
· Avoid turning on large appliances such as washers, dryers, and electric ovens during peak energy hours: from 5:00 am to 9:00 am and 4: pm to 7:00 pm.
· Install white window curtains to reflect heat away from the house. Close them at night to reduce the amount of heat lost through windows. People who live in countries that have warm climates should do this during the day as well.
· Turn off the lights in any room you are not using and consider installing timers, photo cells, or occupancy sensors to reduce the amount of time your lights are on.
Na frase “People who live in countries that have warm climates…” a palavra destacada está sendo usada como:
For taxpayer advocate, a familiar refrain
By Michelle Singletary, Published: January 15, 2013
It’s not nice to tell people “I told you so.” But if anybody has the right to say that, it’s Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate.
Olson recently submitted her annual report to Congress and top on her list of things that need to be fixed is the complexity of the tax
code, which she called the most serious problem facing taxpayers.
Let’s just look at the most recent evidence of complexity run amok. The Internal Revenue Service had to delay the tax-filing season so it
could update forms and its programming to accommodate recent changes made under the American Taxpayer Relief Act. The IRS won’t start
processing individual income tax returns until Jan. 30. Yet one thing remains unchanged − the April 15 tax deadline.
Because of the new tax laws, the IRS also had to release updated income-tax withholding tables for 2013. These replace the tables
issued Dec. 31. Yes, let’s just keep making more work for the agency that is already overburdened. Not to mention the extra work for
employers, who have to use the revised information to correct the amount of Social Security tax withheld in 2013. And they have to make that
correction in order to withhold a larger Social Security tax of 6.2 percent on wages, following the expiration of the payroll tax cut in effect for
2011 and 2012.
Oh, and there was the near miss with the alternative minimum tax that could have delayed the tax filing season to late March. The AMT
was created to target high-income taxpayers who were claiming so many deductions that they owed little or no income tax. Olson and many
others have complained for years that the AMT wasn’t indexed for inflation.
“Many middle- and upper-middle-class taxpayers pay the AMT, while most wealthy taxpayers do not, and thousands of millionaires pay
..A.. income tax at all,” Olson said.
As part of the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, the AMT is now fixed, a move that the IRS was anticipating. It had already decided to program its
systems on the assumption that an AMT patch would be passed, Olson said. Had the agency not taken the risk, the time it would have taken to
update the systems “would have brought about the most chaotic filing season in memory,” she said in her report.
The tax code contains almost 4 million words. Since 2001, there have been about 4,680 changes, or an average of more than one
change a day. What else troubles Olson? Here’s what:
− Nearly 60 percent of taxpayers hire paid preparers, and another 30 percent rely on commercial software to prepare their returns.
− Many taxpayers don’t really know how their taxes are computed and what rate of tax they pay.
− The complex code makes tax fraud ..B.. to detect.
− Because the code is so complicated, it creates an impression that many taxpayers are not paying their fair share. This reduces trust
in the system and perhaps leads some people to cheat. Who wants to be the sucker in this game? So someone might not declare
all of his income, rationalizing that millionaires get to use the convoluted code to greatly reduce their tax liability.
− In fiscal year 2012, the IRS received around 125 million calls. But the agency answered only about two out of three calls from
people trying to reach a live person, and those taxpayers had to wait, on average, about 17 minutes to get through.
“I hope 2013 brings about fundamental tax simplification,” Olson pleaded in her report. She urged Congress to reassess the need for
the tax breaks we know as income exclusions, exemptions, deductions and credits. It’s all these tax advantage breaks that complicate the
code. If done right, and without reducing revenue, tax rates could be substantially lowered in exchange for ending tax breaks, she said.
(Adapted from http://js.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-taxpayer-advocate-a-familiar-refrain/2013/01/15/a10327ce-5f59-
11e2-b05a-605528f6b712_story.html)
A alternativa que preenche corretamente a lacuna ..A.. é
Choose the best dialogue completion:
I don't remember ____________ about the accident.
Choose the best dialogue completion:
I don’t remember ____________ about the accident.
The right foot is more ticklish than the left one. It is not related to laterality but in scientific experiments most people report that their right foot is more ticklish.
(Adapted from Speak up)
GLOSSARY
ticklish – ter cócegas
laterality – lateralidade
In “The right foot is more ticklish than the left one”, the word, in bold type, is
O pronome it, na 2a linha do texto, refere-se a
Fill in the blanks with the right group of words.
We are having a fantastic time. Yesterday we spent a day at the beach. I only spent a ____minutes in the sun, because I didn't want to get burnt. However, there were ____ people who were badly burnt, but they carried sunbathing!
In the evening, we went to the disco. There w ere____ people at first but after midnight they all started to arrive. I met a nice girl, but we couldn't talk____because there was____. I hope she is there tonight!
Choose the best alternative to complete the sentence.
“The girls climbed that tree _____.”
Dear Jane,
Everybody says that people like to wear sunglasses. My mother has two and my sisters have many. In my opinion, sunglasses make people look artificial. My friends disagree with me. They always do that. Nobody understands me. Am I wrong?
Complete with the CORRECT word for the phrase below:
There wasn`t _______ at home
REFERS TO QUESTION
Lessons for Americans, From a Chines Classroom
Observing how Chinese 2- and 3-year-olds navigated a second language, I wondered whether I could have done this for my children.
SHANGHAI — We sat in toddler-size wooden chairs around an orderly circle of Chinese 2-year-olds, busy with circle time. As a parent of three children who collectively spent 15 years in American day care, I am very familiar with circle time.
But I was in this Shanghai classroom as a professor, with college students from many different countries in a class I’m teaching here on children and childhood.
We were observing in a private kindergarten, designed to provide young children — starting at age 2 — with a carefully structured, fully bilingual curriculum, especially important because English language skills are vital for educational success in China.
Visits to Chinese educational institutions allow the college students in my course to get a look at real children and the ways that they learn, while also thinking about Chinese society today. They get windows onto certain slices of this complex country: a high-end private bilingual program that starts with toddlers; a city high school for academically gifted students; a middle school created for the children of the rural migrants who have come by the millions from China’s poorer provinces to work in Shanghai, but whose rights to social benefits are severely limited in the city.
These visits offer the college students insights into many of the social issues facing China, and we spend time in class discussing questions like the huge role that the annual gaokao college entrance exam plays in determining a child’s educational destiny (English is one of the required subjects), the pressures on families that create a culture of cram schools, and the controversies over reserving spots in colleges for kids from rural areas.
But all of those questions have powerful resonances when you think about the issues of childhood education and child development, which have to be addressed in every country. As my college students discuss the different facets of childhood around the world, visiting the Chinese schools also helps them in remembering and thinking about what children look like at different ages, and how they play and interact and learn.
Available in : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/, accessed on
February 26th, 2020. Adapted
The word WHO is:
Choose the right answer:
Several researchers were working on the survey, each came up with some interesting proposals, and typically ____ claimed that ____ was the best.
The majority of ____ are concerned about new
technology, until we’ve actually tried them out for
____.