Questões de Inglês - Comparativo e superlativo de adjetivos | Comparative and superlative para Concurso
Foram encontradas 164 questões
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, no contexto, preenche adequadamente a lacuna ..B.. é
In the sentence
Like most young people of my generation, I started using drugs as an adolescent. By the time I was 16, I was taking cannabis, hallucinogens and injecting drugs. Soon, my addiction led me to drug trafficking. Between 1985 and 1993, I was imprisoned in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, where I was diagnosed HIV-positive.
Initially, I was shocked. But I didn't really know what HIV or AIDS were, which is why I continued using drugs and sharing needles with other inmates. We received no guidance or preventive care.
In prison, AIDS first manifested itself through tuberculosis, an illness I suffered from three times. Although I was eventually given anti-retroviral medicines, I continued taking drugs and only restarted the treatment in earnest after abandoning drugs for good in 1999.
At that time, I was a member of a support group in my hometown, the coastal city of São Vicente, and was close to other HIV-positive people. We soon decided to establish the Hipupiara NGO to promote a sense of unity among people living with HIV and to improve their quality of life.
Unfortunately, I suffered a lot of prejudice for being HIV-positive, including from members of my family. I was also denied jobs. Then, in 2001, I started working as a fisherman, a job I retired from in 2005, at 50, due to poor health.
Today, I am free of drugs and am sticking to the treatment. I work as a volunteer for Hipupiara, contacting drug users in the city and referring them to treatment and assistance services.
Thanks to all the information I have accumulated about HIV/AIDS, I can now face and beat prejudice. People infected with HIV and drug users should not close up or avoid talking about their problems; we should help each other so that we can all lead a better life.
Based on the text, judge the items below.
By Rachel Ehrenberg Science News, Web edition: Monday, February 21st, 2011
WASHINGTON — Getting blood or other perishable supplies to an area that’s been struck by an earthquake or hurricane isn’t as simple as asking what brown can do for you. But a new model quickly determines the best routes and means for delivering humanitarian aid, even in situations where bridges are out or airport tarmacs are clogged with planes.
The research, presented February 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, could help get supplies to areas which have experienced natural disasters or help prepare for efficient distribution of vaccines when the flu hits.
Efficient supply chains have long been a goal of manufacturers, but transport in fragile networks — where supply, demand and delivery routes may be in extremely rapid flux — requires a different approach, said Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who presented the new work. Rather than considering the shortest path from one place to another to maximize profit, her system aims for the cleanest path at minimum cost, while capturing factors such as the perishability of the product and the uncertainty of supply routes. ‘You don’t know where demand is, so it’s tricky,’ said Nagurney. ‘It’s a multicriteria decision-making problem.’
By calculating the total cost associated with each link in a network, accounting for congestion and incorporating penalties for time and products that are lost, the computer model calculates the best supply chain in situations where standard routes may be disrupted.
‘Mathematical tools are essential to develop formal means to predict, and to respond to, such critical perturbations,’ said Iain Couzin of Princeton University, who uses similar computational tools to study collective animal behavior. ‘This is particularly important where response must be rapid and effective, such as during disaster scenarios … or during epidemics or breaches of national security.
’ The work can be applied to immediate, pressing situations, such as getting blood, food or medication to a disaster site, or to longer-term problems such as determining the best locations for manufacturing flu vaccines. . Retrieved April 7th, 2011.
Based on the text above, judge the items below.
The bigger the project, the fewer people are demanded.
Virus writers know more about computers than hackers.
I. Brazil is ________ Argentina.
II. Japan is _________ Bolivia.
III. The Everest is _________mountain in the world.
IV. France is not __________ Canada.
Based on the text above, judge the items below.
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
By JOHN MARKOFF
A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and usiness computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world's eading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downandup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys.
Experts say it is the infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world.
Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters.
Many computer users may not notice that their machines have been infected, and computer security researchers said they were waiting for the instructions to materialize, to determine what impact the botnet will have on PC users. It might operate in the background, using the infected computer to send spam or infect other computers, or it might steal the PC user's personal information.
Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.
Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October.
Unraveling the program has been particularly challenging because it comes with encryption mechanisms that hide its internal workings from those seeking to disable it.
The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally, greatly complicating the task of law enforcement and security companies trying to intervene and block the activation of the botnet.
Several computer security firms said that although Conficker appeared to have been written from scratch, it had parallels to the work of a suspected Eastern European criminal gang that has profited by sending programs known as "scareware" to personal computers that seem to warn users of an infection and ask for credit card numbers to pay for bogus antivirus software that actually further infects their computer.
One intriguing clue left by the malware authors is that the first version of the program checked to see if the computer had a Ukrainian keyboard layout. If it found it had such a keyboard, it would not infect the machine, according to Phillip Porras, a security investigator at SRI International who has disassembled the program to determine how it functioned.
(Adapted from The New York Times)
According to the text,
World Bank Brazil – country brief
1 With an estimated 167 million inhabitants, Brazil has the
largest population in Latin America and ranks sixth in the world. The
majority live in the south-central area, which includes industrial cities
4 such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. 80% of the
population now lives in urban areas. Rapid growth in the urban
population has aided economic development but also created serious
7 problems for major cities.
Brazil’s “miracle years” were in the late 1960s and early 1970s
when double digit-annual growth rates were recorded and the structure
10 of the economy underwent rapid change.
In the 1980s, however, Brazil’s economic performance was
poor in comparison with its potential. Annual Gross Domestic Product
13 (GDP) growth only averaged 1.5 percent over the period from 1980
to 1993. This reflected the economy’s inability to respond to
international events in the late 1970s and the 1980s: the second oil
16 shock; increase in international real interest rates; the Latin American
external debt crisis and the ensuing cutoff of foreign credit and foreign
direct investment. This lack of responsiveness reflected the largely
19 inward-looking policy orientation that had been in place since the
1960s.
Economic flexibility was further impaired by provisions of the
22 1988 Constitution, which introduced significant rigidities in budgeting
and public expenditure. An outcome of these pressures was a steady
rise in the rate of inflation, which reached monthly rates of 50% by the
25 middle of 1994.
Internet: <http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/Exter…/
abe36259ca656c4985256914005207e3?OpenDocumen> (with adaptations).
The sentence "Rapid growth in the urban population has aided economic development but also created serious problems for major cities" (R.5-7) means the same as