Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

GEORGE FLOYD, FROM ‘I WANT TO TOUCH THE WORLD’ TO ‘I CAN’T BREATHE’

HOUSTON — It was the last day of 11th grade at Jack Yates High School in Houston, nearly three decades ago. A group of close friends, on their way home, were contemplating what senior year and beyond would bring. They were black teenagers on the precipice of manhood. What, they asked one another, did they want to do with their lives?

 “George turned to me and said, ‘I want to touch the world,’” said Jonathan Veal, 45, recalling the aspiration of one of the young men — a tall, gregarious star athlete named George Floyd whom he had met in the school cafeteria on the first day of sixth grade. To their 17-year-old minds, touching the world maybe meant the N.B.A. or the N.F.L.

“It was one of the first moments I remembered after learning what happened to him,” Mr. Veal said. “He could not have imagined that this is the tragic way people would know his name.”

The world now knows George Perry Floyd Jr. through his final harrowing moments, as he begged for air, his face wedged for nearly nine minutes between a city street and a police officer’s knee.

    This year, roughly a quarter of the vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. What happens to a rich and unique biome when so much is destroyed?

     The unprecedented fires in the wetland have attracted less attention than blazes in Australia, the Western United States and the Amazon, its celebrity sibling to the north. But while the Pantanal is not a global household name, tourists in the know flock there because it is home to exceptionally high concentrations of breathtaking wildlife: Jaguars, tapirs, endangered giant otters and bright blue hyacinth macaws. Like a vast tub, the wetland swells with water during the rainy season and empties out during the dry months. Fittingly, this rhythm has a name that evokes a beating heart: the flood pulse.

     The wetland, which is larger than Greece and stretches over parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, also offers unseen gifts to a vast swath of South America by regulating the water cycle upon which life depends. Its countless swamps, lagoons and tributaries purify water and help prevent floods and droughts. They also store untold amounts of carbon, helping to stabilize the climate.

     For centuries, ranchers have used fire to clear fields and new land. But this year, drought worsened by climate change turned the wetlands into a tinderbox and the fires raged out of control.

Catrin Einhorn, Maria Magdalena Arréllaga, Blacki Migliozzi

and Scott Reinhard. Oct. 13, 2020.

    It was Maria’s first day at school, her first week in the United States. Her middle school in San Francisco was the biggest building she’d ever seen. It was bigger than the entire Best Buy store she’d walked through in awe on her first day in the city.

     Eventually, Maria found her way to class, a special setting for Spanish-speaking newcomers. There she would practice English words for colors and numbers, learn how to introduce herself and how to say thank you. By eighth grade she was moved into mainstream classes, where she struggled. It didn’t help that her math teacher started each class by saying, “Okay, my little dummies.” He spoke really fast. Maria never raised her hand in his class.

     One day Maria stopped by the administrative office, looking for someone to help her with multiplication. She took her spot in line behind a middle-aged woman who chatted with her in Spanish as they waited. Maria said school was really hard for her. The woman told her not to worry. “Latinas usually don’t finish high school,” she said. “They go to work or raise kids.”

     The woman was right, statistically speaking, and Maria’s middle-school experience all but ensured she’d join the 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos who drop out of high school. She graduated from eighth grade without learning to speak English. She had a hard time writing in Spanish and didn’t know how to multiply.

Internet: <www.motherjones.com> (adapted).

    “Millions of children, every year, start school excited about what they will learn, but quickly become disillusioned when they get the idea they are not as ‘smart’ as others,” writes Jo Boaler. That’s because parents and teachers inadvertently give out the message that talent is inborn — you either have it or you don’t.

     As a math professor, Boaler has seen this firsthand. Many young adults enter her class anxious about math, and their fear about learning impacts their ability to learn.

     “The myth that our brains are fixed and that we simply don’t have the aptitude for certain topics is not only scientifically inaccurate; it is omnipresent and negatively impacts not only education, but many other events in our everyday lives,” she writes. Even though the science of neuroplasticity — how our brains change in response to learning — suggests learning can take place at any age, this news has not made it into classrooms, she argues.

     Some of our misguided visions of talent have led to racist and sexist attitudes, she writes. For example, many girls get the message early on that math is for boys and that boys are better at it, interfering with their ability to succeed and leading to gender disparities in fields of study related to math. Similarly, people of color may also have to overcome stereotypes about fixed intelligence in order to thrive.

Internet: <greatergood.berkeley.edu> (adapted)