Questões de Concurso Sobre sinônimos | synonyms em inglês

     Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Central Park Conservancy announced that the hedge fund billionaire John A. Paulson, along with the Paulson Family Foundation, were giving $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy. It is believed to be the largest gift ever to a public park.

     Mr. Paulson, a lifelong New Yorker, said that as an infant he was pushed around in a baby carriage in the park and that he later remembered going to Bethesda Fountain as a teenager and seeing it covered in graffiti, with no water flowing. The announcement of the gift carne during a
ceremony at the fountain.
    When asked at the news conference what prompted the gift, Mr. Paulson said: "Walking through the
park in different seasons, it kept coming back that in my mind Central Park is the most deserving of ali of New York's cultural institutions. And I wanted the amount to make a difference. The park is very  large, and its endowment is relatively small."
    The park's current endowment stands at $144 million. Half of Mr. Paulson's gift will go to the endowment, while the other half will be used for capital improvements. Mr. Paulson mentioned that he considered important: Restoring the park's North Woods, and sprucing up the Merchanfs Gate entrance at the park's Southwest comer, the most heavily used entrance.
     Mr. Paulson has been a supporter of the Central Park Conservancy for 20 years, but this is his first major gift to the park. He joined the conservancy's board in June.
     Two former parks commissioners, Henry Stern and  Adrian Benepe, were at the news conference on Tuesday. It  was also attended by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and Richard Gilder, key figures in the conservancy's founding.
     The announcement was made under cloudy skies in a ceremony attended by hundreds of employees of the Central Park Conservancy in their gray sweatshirts, as well  as the conservancy's board. Doug Blonsky, the president and chief executive officer of the conservancy, which operates Central Park for the city, hailed the gift as "transformational," saying that it would break the cycle of  restoration and decline that has marked the park  throughout its 153-year history.

                                                                                                                      (h ttp ://www. nytimes. com)

                                  This (Illegal) American Life

      My parents came to New York City to make their fortune when I was a baby. Irresponsible and dreamy and in their early 20s, they didn't think things through when their visa expired; they decided to stay just a bit longer to build up a nest egg.

      But our stay got progressively longer, until, when I was 6, my grandfather died in South America. My father decided my mother and I should go to the funeral and, with assurances that he would handle everything, sat me down and told me I'd have a nice visit in his boyhood home in Argentina, then be back in America in a month.

      I didn't see him for two years.

      We couldn't get a visa to return. My father sent us money from New Jersey, as the months of our absence stretched into years. Finally, he met someone who knew "coyotes" - people who smuggled others into the U.S. via Mexico. He paid them what they asked for, and we flew to Mexico City.

      They drove us to the Mexican side of the border, and left us at a beach. Another from their operation picked us up there and drove us across as his family. We passed Disneyland on our way to the airport, where we boarded the plane to finally rejoin my father.

      As a child, I had thought coming back home would be the magical end to our troubles, but in many ways it was the beginning. I chafed at the strictures of undocumented life: no social security number meant no public school (instead I attended a Catholic school my parents could scarcely afford); no driver's license, no after-school job. My parents had made their choices, and I had to live with those, seeing off my classmates as they left on a class trip to Canada, or packing to go off to college, where 1 could not go.

      The year before I graduated from high school, Congress passed the amnesty law of 1987. A few months after my 18th birthday, I became legal and what had always seemed a blank future of no hope suddenly turned dazzling with possibility.

      When I went for my interview at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the caseworker looked at me quizzically when he heard me talk in unaccented English and joke about current events. Surely this American teenager did not fit in with the crowd of illegals looking to make things right.

      At the time, I was flattered. His confusion meant I could pass as an American.

                                  (Newsweek, October 2f 2008. Page 12.)