Q89056 | Inglês (Língua Inglesa)
Banca: Cebraspe (Cespe)Ver cursos
Ano: 2007
Órgao: IRBr - Instituto Rio Branco
Cargo: Diplomata - Terceiro Secretário
Padrão de resposta30 linhas
SUMMARY & TEXTUAL EXERCISES (Total: 25 marks)
A. Read the following text adapted from Empires with Expiration Dates by Niall Ferguson in FOREIGN POLICY, nr. 156 (Sept./Oct. 2006), and complete the exercises at the end. (10 marks)
B. Summarize the text, in your own words, in up to 200 words. (15 marks)
Empires, more than nation-states, are the principal actors on the stage of world history. Much of history consists of the deeds of the few score empires that once ruled alien peoples across large tracts of the globe. Yet the lifespan of empires has tended to decline. Compared with their predecessors, the empires of the last century were singularly shortlived. Reduced imperial life expectancy has profound implications for our own time.
Officially, there are no empires now, only 190-plus nation-states. Yet the ghosts of empires past continue to stalk the Earth. Regional conflicts are easily — nay, often glibly — explained in terms of imperial sins of yore: an arbitrary border here, a strategy of divide-and-rule there.
Moreover, many of today’s most important states are still recognizably the progeny of empires. Imperial inheritance is apparent from the Russian Federation to Great Britain, Italy and Germany. India is the heir of the Mughal Empire and the British Raj, China the direct descendant of the Middle Kingdom. In the Americas, the imperial legacy is patent from Canada to Argentina.
Today’s world, in short, is as much one of ex-empires and former colonies as it is of nation-states. Even institutions designed to reorder the world after 1945 have a distinctly imperial bent. For what __________ are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council if not a cozy __________ of empires past? And what, pray, is “humanitarian intervention” if not a more politically correct-sounding version of the western empires’ old “civilizing mission”?
Empires’ life cycles and geographic reach are remarkably irregular. Whereas the average Roman empire lasted over 800 years, equivalents elsewhere before the modern age survived no more than half that time.
The empires forged in the 20th century, by contrast, were comparatively short. Why did they prove so ephemeral? The answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control, and social homogeneity to which the Communists in Russia and China, the Fascists in Germany and Italy and the expansionist Japanese aspired. They were not content with the haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old empires. Though they inherited from the 19thcentury nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity, these new “empire states” repudiated religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They relished sweeping away old political institutions and existing social structures. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness.
The empire states of the mid-20th century were to a considerable extent the architects of their own demise. In particular, the Germans and Japaneses imposed their authority on other peoples with such unbridled ferocity that they undermined local collaboration thus laying the foundations for indigenous resistance. At the same time, their territorial ambitions were so boundless that they swiftly conjured into being an unassailable coalition of imperial rivals in the form of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Empires do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to unite against them. The crucial question is whether or not today’s global powers behave differently from their imperial forebears.
Publicly, the leaders of the American and Chinese republics deny entertaining imperial designs. Both states are the product of revolutions and have entrenched anti-imperialist traditions. Yet the mask does slip on occasions. In 2004 a senior presidential advisor confided to a journalist: “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.” Similar thoughts may cross the minds of China’s leaders. In any case, it is perfectly possible for a republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in denial about its loss of republican virtue.
A historical pattern of U.S. imperial intervention underpins the widespread assumption that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq will not long outlast President Bush’s term in office. Empire — especially unstated empire — is ephemeral in a way that sets our own age quite apart. In the American case, however, the real snag is not the alienation of conquered peoples or threats posed by rival empires (the prime solvents of other 20th-century empires) but domestic constraints. These take three distinct forms.
The first can be classified as a troop deficit. The United States prefers to maintain a relatively small proportion of its population in the armed forces, at 0.5 percent. Moreover, only a small and highly trained part of this military is available for combat duties overseas. Members of this elite are not to be readily sacrificed. Nor are they easy to replace.
The second constraint on America’s tacit empire is the burgeoning budget deficit. The costs of the war in Iraq have substantially exceeded the administration’s forecast: $290 billion since the invasion in 2003.
Finally, there is the attention deficit. Past empires were not sorely taxed to sustain public support for protracted conflicts. The American public, by contrast, tires quickly. It has taken less than 18 months for a majority of American voters to start viewing the invasion of Iraq as a mistake.
An empire will thrive and endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples outstrip the costs of doing so in the eyes of the imperialists; and so long as the benefits of knuckling under a foreign yoke exceed the costs of resistance in the eyes of the subjects. Such calculations implicitly take stock of the potential costs of relinquishing power to a rival empire.
For the time being, the costs of empire building look too high to most Americans while the benefits seem at best nebulous. Moreover, a rival equipped or willing to do the job is clearly wanting. With its republican institutions battered but still intact, the United States hardly passes muster as a latter-day Rome.
All that may change, however. In a world where natural resources are destined to become scarcer, the old mainsprings of imperial rivalry resist. Empire today is both unstated and unsung. History suggests, though, that the calculus of power could well swing back in its favor tomorrow.
TEXTUAL EXERCISES (Total: 10 marks, 2 per correct answer)
a) Fill in each of the two gaps in paragraph four of the text above with an appropriate word or phrase:
a) Fill in each of the two gaps in paragraph four of the text above with an appropriate word or phrase:
“For what __________ are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council if not a cozy __________ of empires past?”
b) Choose the most appropriate substitute in context for the words underlined in paragraph twelve:
I. taxed: “Past empires were not sorely taxed to sustain public support for protracted conflicts.”
1) drained
2) compelled
3) levied
4) hurt
5) pressed
2) compelled
3) levied
4) hurt
5) pressed
II. protracted: “Past empires were not sorely taxed to sustain public support for protracted conflicts.”
1) dreadful
2) damaging
3) drawn out
4) costly
5) withering
2) damaging
3) drawn out
4) costly
5) withering
c) Re-write the following sentence from the antepenultimate paragraph of the text starting as indicated below:
“An empire will thrive and endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples outstrip the costs of doing so in the eyes of the imperialists.”
Only when the benefits __________________________________________ ______________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________
1) Apenas um exemplo. O conteúdo real é bem diferente.
O tipo de auditoria mais apropriado para o caso é a auditoria de regularidade ou de conformidade. No que tange ao objeto auditado, pode-se extrair dois tipos principais de auditoria: a auditoria de regularidade (ou conformidade) e a auditoria operacional (ou de desempenho).
Segundo a Organização Internacional de Entidades Fiscalizadoras Superiores – INTOSAI, a Auditoria de regularidade (regularity audit) compreende Auditoria financeira, Auditoria de controles internos e Auditoria da legalidade de atos administrativos.
Já a auditoria operacional, por sua vez, tem um foco mais voltado para a gestão. Segundo o Manual de Auditoria Operacional do TC, a auditoria operacional é o processo de coleta e análise sistemáticas de informações sobre características, processos e resultados de um programa, atividade ou organização, com base em critérios fundamentados, com o objetivo de aferir o desempenho da gestão governamental.
Tópico 2: Três procedimentos de auditoria que deverão ser adotados. Justifique-os.
Há uma série de procedimentos de que podem ser adotados no processo de fiscalização e auditoria, que podem ser citadas na resposta.
1) Avaliação do Sistema de Controle Interno: avaliação dos controles que auxiliam a entidade a cumprir as leis, as normas e os regulamentos;
2) Circularização (Confirmação Externa): confirmação, junto a terceiros, de fatos alegados pela entidade;
3) Exame e comparação de livros e registos: o confronto, o contejamento e a comparação de registros e documentos, para a comprovação da validade e autenticidade do universo, população ou amostra examinada;
4) Exame e comprovação documental: consistem em apurar, demonstrar, corroborar e concorrer para provar, acima de qualquer dúvida cabível, a validade e autenticidade de uma situação, documento ou atributo ou responsabilidade do universo auditado, através de provas obtidas em documentos integrantes dos processos administrativo, orçamentário, financeiro, contábil, operacional, patrimonial, ou gerencial do ente público no curso normal da sua atividade e dos quais o profissional de auditoria governamental se vale para evidenciar suas constatações, conclusões e recomendações.
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Translation (total: 35 marks)
PART A (20 marks)
Translate into Portuguese the following excerpt adapted from Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech which opened a series of United Nations seminars at Brandeis University on December 17th, 1954:
You hear people say, “Why hasn’t the United Nations done this or that?” The United Nations functions just as well as the member nations make it function, no better or worse. So the first thing to look at is the kind of machinery that was set up, and what it was meant to do.
Now we have to cast our minds back to the time when the Charter was first planned. The war was not over, and this was a dream — an idea to set up an organization, the object of which was to ke…
It will be no surprise to those who follow UN affairs that the end of the Cold War has been the single most formative experience in the existence of the Security Council. There are many ways to demonstrate this. The simplest is to count the absolute number of Council resolutions. For the period 1946-1989 the annual average number of resolutions passed was fifteen; since then the average has been more than sixty. The Council has moved from roughly one decision a month to one per week. This is indeed a dramatic change.
Peter Wallensteen e Patrick Johansson’s. Security Council decisions in perspective. In: Malone, D.M. ed. The United Nations Security Council: from the Cold War to the 21s…
One of the more complicated problems of second language learning and teaching has been to define and apply the construction of motivation in the classroom. On the one hand, it is easy catchword that gives teachers a simple answer to the mysteries of language learning. “Motivation is the difference”, I have heard people say, “between success and failure. If they’re motivated, they’ll learn, and if not, they won’t”.
How would you define motivation? Let me offer the following “dictionary definition” drawn from a number of different sources: Motivation is the extent to which you make choices about a) goals to pursue and b) the effort you will devote that pursuit.
H. Douglas Brown.
