Questões de Concurso Sobre aspectos linguísticos | linguistic aspects em inglês

     The Port of Santos is located in the city of Santos, Brazil. As of 2006, it is the busiest container port in Latin America. It is Brazil’s leading port in container traffic. Today it is Latin America’s largest port. Its structure is considered Brazil’s most modern.

     It was once considered the ‘port of death’ in the 19th century. Ships tended to avoid docking at the wood plank port, fearing the yellow fever. The floods in the city’s area provoked illnesses and once the bubonic plague almost decimated the population.

     In the early 20th century, major urbanization created the port’s modern structure seen today, eliminating the risk of diseases and providing the port with modern, industrial-age infrastructure.

     The first railway link from the port to the state capital São Paulo City, 79 km away, and the state’s interior, was completed in 1864. This allowed for an easier transportation of the vast masses of migrant workers who headed to São Paulo and the state’s numerous coffee farms.

     Millions of immigrants reached Brazil via the port of Santos in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proceeding to the country’s interior by railway. Santos was for a few decades the true gateway to Brazil for millions of immigrants.

(Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Santos – acesso em 21.01.2011)

Subways

Posted on Friday March 27th, 2009 by Jebediah Reed

To give some sense of the pace of public works construction in China, the city of Guangzhou is planning to open 83 miles of new subway lines by the end of next year. Meanwhile, New York - a city of about the same size - has been playing around with the 1.7-mile Second Avenue line for
decades now. China also builds subways rather cheaply - $100 million per mile versus $ 2.4 billion per mile in the Big Apple.

Not surprisingly, projects there are more aggressive in all respects: there are 60 tunnel boring machines operating in Guangzhou, while only one is slated for the Second Avenue project;workers put in five 12-hour shifts a week (and if they don’t like it, they can go pound glacial till); and seizing property is a breeze.

An article in the Business section of today’s NY Times (Clash of Subways and Car Culture in Chinese Cities by Keith Bradsher) [VERB] a smart look at the forces at play as China goes on a transit infrastructure spending spree while it simultaneously becomes evermore sprawling and car-centric.

Here’s one interesting passage, [CONJUNCTION] the story is worth reading in its entirety:

Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities. But they warn that other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom.

Mr. Chan Shao Zhang , a 67-year-old engineer in charge of the works in Guangzhou, defended Guangzhou’s combination of cars and subways, saying that the city built a subway line to a new Toyota assembly plant to help employees and suppliers reach it.

Subways have been most competitive in cities like New York that have high prices for parking, and tolls for bridges and tunnels, discouraging car use. Few Chinese cities have been willing to follow suit, other than Shanghai, which charges a fee of several thousand dollars for each license plate.

The cost and physical limitations of subways have discouraged most cities from building new ones. For instance, only Tokyo has a subway system that carries more people than its buses. The buses are cheaper and able to serve far more streets but move more slowly, pollute more and contribute to traffic congestion.

China has reason to worry. It surpassed the United States in total vehicle sales for the first time in January, although the United States remained slightly ahead in car sales. But in February, China overtook the United States in both, in part because the global downturn has hurt auto sales much more in the United States than in China.

There are many countervaling forces . China has passed its own stimulus package and the government is eager to put people to work, create economic activity, and build modern infrastructure. The Guangzhou project is part of major national transit buildout. But the nation’s cities are also sprawling beasts, and in that sense, more suited to cars than trains. Not shockingly, many Chinese prefer the former.

(Adapted from http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/03/27/-building-a-subway-is-96-percent-cheaper-in-china/)