Questões de Inglês - Pronomes | Pronouns para Concurso

        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

December 12, 2012
If It’s for Sale, His Lines Sort It
By MARGALIT FOX

It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man’s
fingers through the sand.
The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a
traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding.
The man on the beach that day was a mechanical-engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative
stroke of his fingers − yielding a set of literal lines in the sand − Mr. Woodland, who died on Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar
code.
Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed
series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men
together made only $15,000 from it, when they sold their patent to Philco. But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately
give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of
different items) is officially known.


       Here is part of the story behind the invention:
       To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the
Boy Scouts.
       What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial
potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
       “What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers
into the sand and for whatever reason − I didn’t know − I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four
lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”
       That consequential pass was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers − they
were still in the sand − and I swept them around into a full circle.”
       Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without
regard for its orientation.
       But that method − a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands −, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with
a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.
       The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 − all they ever made from their invention.
       By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951
until his retirement in 1987.
       Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an
I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing
on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.
(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-the-bar-code-dies-at-91.html?nl=todaysheadlines
&emc=edit_th_20121214&_r=0)


O pronome “It”, no início do texto, refere-se a

In the fragment “as those experienced by their bigger counterparts” (line 92) the pronoun those refers to

In the excerpt of the text - “are especially critical for workers and managers in a globalized economy defined by its unpredictability and dynamism.” - (lines 39 - 41) the possessive pronoun its refers to