Questões de Inglês - Voz Ativa e Passiva | Passive and Active Voice para Concurso

How monks helped invent sign language

      For millennia people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted that “Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb.” Under Roman law people who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write.”

      Pushback against such ideas began in the 16th-century, with the creation of the first formal sign language for the hearing impaired, by Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new one. Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes and to facilitate trade with Europeans. Benedictine monks had used them to convey messages during their daily periods of silence. Inspired by the latter practice, Ponce de León adapted the gestures used in his monastery to create a method for teaching the deaf to communicate, paving the way for systems now used all over the world.

      Building on Ponce de León’s work, another Spanish cleric and linguist, Juan Pablo Bonet, proposed that deaf people learn to pronounce words and progressively construct meaningful phrases. Bonet’s approach combined oralism – using sounds to communicate – with sign language. The system had its challenges, especially when learning the words for abstract terms, or intangible forms such as conjunctions like “for,” “nor,” or “yet.”

      In 1755 the French Catholic priest Charles-Michel de l’Épée established a more comprehensive method for educating the deaf, which culminated in the founding of the first public school for deaf children, in Paris. Students came to the institute from all over France, bringing signs they had used to communicate with at home. Insistent that sign language needed to be a complete language, his system was complex enough to express prepositions, conjunctions, and other grammatical elements.

      Épée’s standardized sign language quickly spread across Europe and to the United States. In 1814 Thomas Gallaudet went to France to learn Épée’s language system. Three years later, Gallaudet established the American School for the Deaf in his hometown in Connecticut. Students from across the United States attended, and they brought signs they used to communicate with at home.American Sign Language became a combination of these signs and those from French Sign Language.

      Thanks to the development of formal sign languages, people with hearing impairment can access spoken language in all its variety. The world’s many modern signing systems have different rules for pronunciation, word order, and grammar. New visual languages can even express regional accents to reflect the complexity and richness of local speech.

(Ines Anton Rayas. www.nationalgeographic.com. 28.05.2019. Adaptado)

Australia fires: What's being done to fight the flames?

Large parts of Australia __________ (devastate) by the worst wildfires the country __________ (see) in decades, with huge blazes tearing through bush, woodland and national parks. Record-breaking temperatures and months of drought __________ (help) the fires burn an estimated 10 million hectares (100,000 sq km) of land since 1 July.

Bushfire conditions EASED over the weekend, giving fire crews a period of temporary respite. But authorities __________ (say) the huge fires will persist until there is substantial rainfall. More hot weather is __________ (expect) next week and the risk was far from over, they said. Thousands of firefighters are still battling blazes across large swathes of Australia - ranging in size from small fires to infernos burning across hectares of land. Entire towns have been engulfed and residents across several states have lost their homes. At least 28 people have died.

State and federal authorities have been working together to try to stem the spread. While they have managed to contain some within a matter of days, the biggest blazes have been burning for months.

At least 3,700 firefighters are on the ground at any one time across the country during the worst periods, according to the country's state fire services. Most are in the worst-hit states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. When fires have been at their worst, about 2,700 firefighters have been battling the blazes at any one time in NSW alone. Ben Shepherd, of the NSW Rural Fire Service, said his colleagues had dealt with 4.2m hectares of burning land this season, compared with the typical 300,000 hectares. "It's been an incredibly long campaign," he said.

Fire crews across the country have been joined by 3,000 army, navy and air force reservists who are assisting with search and rescue and clean-up efforts. Further support coming from the US, Canada, and New Zealand, who have sent additional teams and equipment to help.

                                         (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51008051 )