Questões de Concurso Comentadas sobre voz ativa e passiva | passive and active voice em inglês

BRAZILIAN INDIANS

    The history of Brazil's indigenous peoples has been marked by brutality, slavery, violence, diseases, and genocide.
    When the first European colonists arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by an estimated 11 million Indians, living in about 2,000 tribes. Within the rst century of contact, 90% were wiped out, mainly through diseases imported by the colonists, such as fiu, measles and smallpox. In the following centuries, thousands more died, enslaved in the rubber and sugar cane plantations.
    By the 1950s the population has dropped to such a low that the eminent senator and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro predicted there would be none left by the year 1980. On average, it is estimated that one tribe became extinct every year over the last century.   
    In 1967, a federal prosecutor named Jader Figueiredo published a 7,000 page report cataloguing thousands of atrocities and crimes committed against the Indians, ranging from murder to land theft to enslavement.
     In one notorious case known as 'The th massacre of the 11 parallel', a rubber baron ordered his men to hurl sticks of dynamite into a Cinta Larga village. Those who survived were murdered when rubber workers entered the village on foot and attacked them with machetes.         

    The report made int e rna tiona l headlines and led to the disbanding of the government's Indian Protection Service (SPI) which was replaced by FUNAI. This remains the government' s indigenous a ff a ir s department today. 

While at home in Ireland my poor mother wept bitter tears at the thought of her daughter with the university education serving hamburgers to pop stars.

I had been working there about six months the night I met James. It was a Friday night, which was traditionally the night the OJs frequented our restaurant. “OJ” standing, of course, for Office Jerks.

At five o’clock every Friday, like graves disgorging their dead, offices all over the center of London liberated their staffs for the weekend so that hordes of pale, cheapsuited clerks descended on us.

It was de rigueur for us waitresses to stand around sneering disdainfully at the besuited clientele, shaking our heads in disbelieving pity at the attire, hairstyles, etc., of the poor customers.

On the night in question, James and three of his colleagues sat in my section and I attended to their needs in my normal irresponsible and slapdash fashion. I paid them almost no attention whatsoever, barely listened to them as I took their order and certainly made no eye contact with them. If I had I might have noticed that one of them (yes, James, of course) was very handsome, in a black-haired, green-eyed, five-foottenish kind of way. I should have looked beyond the suit and seen the soul of the man.

Oh, shallowness, thy name is Clare.

But I wanted to be out back with the other waitresses, drinking beer and smoking and talking about sex. Customers were an unwelcome interference.

“Can I have my stake very rare?” asked one of the men.

“Um,” I said vaguely. I was even more uninterested than usual because I had noticed a book on the table. It was a really good book, one that I had read myself.

I loved books. And I loved reading. And I loved men who read. I loved a man who knew his existentialism from his magi-realism.And I had spent the last six months working with people who could just about manage to read Stage magazine (laboriously mouthing the words silently as they did so). I suddenly realized, with a pang, how much I missed the odd bit of intelligent conversation.

Suddenly the people at this table stopped being mere irritants and took on some sort of identity for me.

“Who owns this book?” I asked abruptly, interrupting the order placing.

The table of four men were startled. I had spoken to them! I had treated them almost as if they were human!

“I do,” said James, and as my blue eyes met his green eyes across his mango daiquiri, that was it, the silvery magic dust was sprinkled on us. In that instant something wonderful happened. From the moment we really looked at each other, we both knew we had met someone special.

I maintained that we fell in love immediately.

He maintained nothing of the sort, and said that I was a romantic fool. He claimed it took at least thirty seconds longer for him to fall in love with me.

First of all he had to establish that I had read the book in question also. Because he thought that I must be some kind of not-so-bright model or singer if I was working there. You know, the same way that I had written him off as some kind of subhuman clerk. Served me right.

KEYES, Marian. Watermelon. New York: Perennial, HarperCollins, 2002 (Edited).

How to beat loneliness

Loneliness is a subjective feeling. You may be surrounded by other people, friends, family, workmates — yet still feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. Other people are not guaranteed to shield us against the raw emotional pain that loneliness inflicts.

But raw emotional pain is only the beginning of the damage loneliness can cause. It has a huge impact on our physical health as well. Loneliness activates our physical and psychological stress responses and suppresses the function of our immune systems. This puts us at increased risk for developing all kinds of illness and diseases, including cardiovascular disease. Shockingly, the longterm risk chronic loneliness poses to our health and longevity is so severe, it actually increases risk of an early death by 26%.

There are many paths to loneliness. Some enter loneliness gradually. A friend moves away, another has a child, a third works a seventy-hour work week, and before we know it our social circle, the one we had relied upon for years, ceases to exist. Others enter loneliness more suddenly, when they leave for college or the military, lose a partner to death or divorce, start a new job, or move to a new town or country. And for some, chronic illness, disability or other limiting conditions have made loneliness a lifelong companion.

Unfortunately, emerging from loneliness is far more challenging than we realize, as the psychological wounds it inflicts create a trap from which it is difficult to break free. Loneliness distorts our perceptions, making us believe the people around us care much less than they actually do, and it makes us view our existing relationships more negatively, such that we see them as less meaningful and important than we would if we were not lonely.

These distorted perceptions have a huge ripple effect, creating self-fulfilling prophecies that ensnare many. Feeling emotionally raw and convinced of our own undesirability and of the diminished caring of others, we hesitate to reach out even as we are likely to respond to overtures from others with hesitance, resentment, skepticism or desperation, effectively pushing away the very people who could alleviate our condition.

As a result, many lonely people withdraw and isolate themselves to avoid risking further rejection or disappointment. And when they do venture into the world, their hesitance and doubts are likely to create the very reaction they fear. They will force themselves to attend a party but feel so convinced others won’t talk to them, they spend the entire evening parked by the hummus and vegetable dip with a scowl on their face, and indeed, no one dares approach — which for them only verifies their fundamental undesirability. […] 

(Source: Guy Winch, at TED Ideas. Retrieved at: http://ideas.ted.com/how-tobeat-loneliness/)