Questões Militares de Inglês - Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension

Based on the text below, answer the question.

Slash and burn Brazil's rainforest is going up in smoke. Again. 

As Brazil'S skyscrapers and silos rose, it seemed the most impressive quality of this 21st-century Latin American powerhouse was its ability to grow without trashing the environment. Just last year, Brasilia was boasting about a steep decline in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a feat that President Dilma Rousseff trumpeted as "impressive, the fruit of social change." What would she say now? 

After nearly a decade of steady decline, forest cutting has spiked again in the world's largest rainforest. The nonprofit Amazon watchdog organization, Imazon, released a study reporting that deforestation at the hands of farmers and ranchers jumped 90 percent in the 12 months since April of last year. And since burning always follows felling, another 88 million tons of carbon dioxide and other gases hit the atmosphere—a 62 percent increase on the year. 

For decades, Brazilians were told that ruin in the Amazon was the price of development. But recent research has imploded that assumption. A paper published by the National Academy of Sciences shows that continued deforestation threatens not just the trees but the progress and riches their removal were thought to guarantee. The paper bolsters an old theory by Brazilian climate scientist Eneas Salati, who argued that the Amazon actually produces half its own rainfall. The takeaway: remove too much of the forests and the Amazon could dry out. And more than the jungle is at stake. Reduced rainfall from forest cutting could dry up the water that powers hydroelectric dams, thus slashing Brazilian power-generating capacity by 40 percent by midcentury. It could also rob the food larder, cutting soybean productivity by 28 percent and beef production by 34 percent. 

Brasilia quickly countered the environmental skeptics by saying that these are unofficial figures, noting that the National Space Institute is still crunching the satellite data. The government is still basking in last year's numbers: only 4,600 square kilometers of forests felled, a fraction of the 27,700 square kilometers lost in 2004. But the Rousseff administration would do well to heed the smoke signals. Even Brasilia admits that Brazil's continued rise to glory turns on the country's ability to stay green.

(Adapted from http://thedailybeast.com/newswek/2013/06/05)

Based on the text below, answer the question.

Facebook deserted by millions of users in biggest markets 

Facebook has lost millions of users per month in its biggest markets. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK. Studies suggest that its expansion in the US, UK and other major European countries has peaked. In the last month, the world's largest social network has lost 6m US visitors, a 4% fall, according to analysis firm Socialbakers. In the UK, 1.4m fewer users visited in March, a fali of 4.5%. Users are also turning off in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook is extremely popular. 

Alternative social networks have seen surges in popularity with younger people. Instagram, the photo-sharing site, got 30m new users in the 18 months before Facebook bought the business. Path, the mobile phone-based social network founded by former Facebook employee Dave Morin, which only allows its users to have 150 friends, is gaining 1m users a week. 

Facebook is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up to 6% in the last month to 70m, according to Socialbakers, whose Information is used by Facebook advertisers. India has seen a 4% rise to 64m - still only a fraction of the country's population, so there is room for more growth. 

As Facebook itself has warned, the time spent on its pages from those sitting in front of personal computers is decreasing fast because people now prefer to use their smartphones and tablets. Although smartphone minutes have doubled in a year, to 69 a month, that growth may not compensate for dwindling desktop usage. 

Facebook will tell investors about its performance for the quarter. Wall Street expects revenues of about $1.44bn, an increase from $1.06bn a year ago. Shareholders will want to know how fast the number of mobile Facebook users is growing, and whether advertising revenues are increasing at the same rate. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has created a series of new initiatives designed to appeal to smartphone users. One initiative, Facebook Home, is software that can be downloaded onto Android phones to feed news and photos from friends - and advertising - directly to the owner's locked home screen.

(Adapted from http://www.guardian.com.uk)