Questões de Concurso

    The reformers' argument is attractive in theory and dangerous in practice. In an ideal world, unilateralism should be avoided. But in an imperfect world, unilateral solutions that run efficiently can be better than multilateral ones that  ....51....

        The job of assigning domain names offers huge opportunities for abuse. ....52.... controls this function can decide to keep certain types of individuals or organizations offline (dissidents or opposition political groups, for example). Or it can allow them on in exchange for large fees. The striking feature of U.S. oversight of the Internet is that such abuses have not occurred.

        It's possible that a multilateral overseer of the Internet might be just as efficient. But the ponderous International Telecommunication Union, the U.N. body that would be a leading candidate to take over the domain registry, has a record of resisting innovation - including the advent of the Internet. Moreover, a multilateral domain-registering body would be caught between the different visions of its members: on the one side, autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China that want to restrict access to the Internet; on the other side, open societies that want low barriers to entry. These clashes of vision would probably make multilateral regulation inefficiently political. You may say that this is a fair price to pay to uphold the principle of sovereignty. If a country wants to keep certain users from registering domain names (Nazi groups, child pornographers, criminals), then perhaps it has a right to do so. But the clinching argument is that countries can exercise that sovereignty to a reasonable degree without controlling domain names. They can order Internet users in their territory to take offensive material down. They can order their banks or credit card companies to refuse to process payments to unsavory Web sites based abroad. Indeed, governments' ample ability to regulate the Internet has already been demonstrated by some of the countries pushing for reform, such as authoritarian China. The sovereign nations of the world have no need to wrest control of the Internet from the United States, because they already have it.

(Adapted from Washington Post, November 21, 2005; A14)

What life in medieval Europe was really like

      A time of innovation, philosophy, and legendary works of art: the realities of the medieval period (500 to 1500 C.E.) in Europe may surprise you. Many know the years before the Renaissance and _________________ that followed as Europe’s “Dark Ages,” a time of backward, slovenly, and brutal people who were technologically primitive and hopelessly superstitious.

     Sure, it would take until the 19th century for the germ theory of disease to overtake the concept of humors and “miasmas” that could damage human health. But the ___________ image of medieval people as slovenly, unwashed, and lacking hygiene is false. In fact, both indoor and outdoor bathing were beloved in Europe. People not only made and used soap at home, but they frequented bathhouses—some public, some private, some merely fronts for brothels.

      A myth persists that during the Middle Ages, the unenlightened believed Earth was flat and worried that ships might even fall off the planet’s edge. That’s patently false: People knew the planet was a sphere as far back as ancient Greece (12th to 9th centuries B.C.), and had relatively complex astronomical and planetary ______________ by the time Christopher Columbus made his voyage to the Americas in 1492.

      The so-called “Dark Ages” is a myth historians have spent years trying to disprove. The myth seems to stem from some authors’ use of “dark” to refer to everything from a 14th-century poet’s complaints about the quality of local literature to a 17th-century historian’s failed attempt to find historical sources from centuries earlier.

(Fonte: National Geographic — adaptado.)