Questões de Concurso Sobre interpretação de texto | reading comprehension em inglês

Snacking at the Colosseum? Prepare to Pay a Fine

Dapper as always in their bleached white shirts and matching caps, members of Rome's municipal police force were out on the Spanish Steps one warm autumn day, trolling for offenders.

"Stefano, look! There's another eater," one officer said to another before sauntering over to a baffled couple who had begun munching on an inoffensive-looking meai while sitting on the steps. The culprits, a couple of foreign tourists, had settled down on the landmark, one of Rome's most famous. In their hands were the offending items: sandwiches.

The officers pounced, and after much waving of hands, the couple wrapped up the sandwiches and slouched away, looking sheepish.

They were in violation unwittingly, in ali probability - of a municipal ordinance that went into force this month. The measure outlaws eating and drinking in areas of "particular historie, artistic, architectonic and cultural value" in Rome's center, to better protect the city's monuments, which include landmarks like the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps. Fines range ali the way up to $650 for culinary recidivists.

Italian cities, Rome included, have long enacted ordinances and regulations to protect monuments from ill- mannered tourists (and residents). But after a recent stroll through the city center, where he saw several people making themselves at home, literally, Rome's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, decided the rules needed toughening.

"There were people camped out, and we weren't able to move them," said Antonio Gazzellone, the municipal council member responsible for tourism, noting that alcohol may have been involved. The new ordinance, which also outlaws camping or "setting up makeshift beds," will "give monuments back their proper decorum," he said. "Rome needs to be protected, its beauty respected."

(http://www.nytimes.com)

A cooling consensus

Global warming has slowed. The rate of warming
over the past 15 years has been lower than that of
the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt
that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated
less than most climate scientists had predicted. Nate
Cohn of the New Republic reports: "Since 1998, the
warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures
have not kept up with computer models that seemed
to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to
falling beneath even the lowest projections".
Mr Cohn does his best to af? rm that the urgent
necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated,
as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as
does this newspaper. But there's no way around
the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news
for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes
and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by
moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The
reality is that the already meagre prospects of these
policies, in America at least, will be devastated if
temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of
the projections that environmentalists have used to
create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether
or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain
advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible,
to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably,
that the scienti? c and media establishment has cried
wolf.
(Source: The Economist, June 20th, 2013)

Question refer to the text below:
Why Some State Immigration Laws are Welcoming
but Others are Downright Hostile