TEXTOS PARA O 4º BIMESTRE 2014 – 3º COL                              

                                     BRAZIL´S POOR SCHOOLS

                                                    STILL A LOT TO LEARN

Brazil´s woeful schools, more than perhaps anything else, are what hold it back. They are improving – but too slowly.

            GOD may be Brazilian, as citizens of South America´s largest country like to say, but he surely played no part in designing its education system. Brazil has much going for it these days – stable politics, an open and fairly harmonious society, na economy that has remembered how to grow after decades of stagnation – but when it comes to the quality of schools, it falls far short even of many other developing countries despite heavy public spending on education.

            In the OECD´s worldwide tests of pupils´ abilities in reading, maths and science, Brazil is near the bottom of the class. Until the 1970s South Korea was about as prosperous as Brazil but, helped by its superior school system, it has leapt ahead and now has around four times the national income per head. World domination, even the friendly and non-confrontational sort Brazil seeks, will not come to a place where 45% of the heads of poor families have less than a year´s schooling.

            Moisés Zacarias, who is 14, goes to school in Diadema, a poor suburb of São Paulo that sprang up when millions of people migrated from the countryside to the country´s biggest metropolis, starting in the 1960s. At his school, which has 2,000 pupils, there are three separate shifts of students every day to get the most out of the buildings and teachers. Last year some pupils beat up others during a lesson and posted a video of the attack on the internet. Teachers often fail to show up for work. But Moisés´s school is better than it was five years ago.

                                                                       (The Economist – adapted)

                        The Modern Matchmakers

Sex and love

Internet dating sites claim to have brought science to

the age-old question of how to pair off successfully. But

___________ they?

            FOR as long as humans have romanced each other, others have wanted to meddle. Whether those others were parents, priests, friends or bureaucrats, their motive was largely the same: they thought they knew what it took to pair people off better than those people knew themselves.

            Today, though, there is a new matchmaker in the village: the internet. It differs from the old ones in two ways. First, its motive is purely profit. Second, single wannabe lovers are queuing up to use it, rather than resenting its adverse criticism. For internet dating sites promise two things that neither traditional matchmakers nor chance encounters at bars, bus-stops and bar mitzvahs offer. One is a vastly greater choice of potential partners. The other is a scientifically proven way of matching suitable people together, enhancing the chance of “happily ever after”.

            The greater choice is unarguable. But does it lead to better outcomes? And do the “scientifically tested algorithms” actually work, and deliver the goods in ways that traditional courtship (or, at least, flirtation) cannot manage? These are the questions asked by a team of psychologists led by Eli Finkel of Northwestern University, in Illinois, in a paper released—probably not coincidentally—a few days before St Valentine’s Day. This paper, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, reviews studies carried out by many groups of psychologists since the earliest internet dating site, Match.com, opened for business in 1995. In it, Dr Finkel and his colleagues cast a sceptical eye over the whole multi-billion-dollar online dating industry, and they are deeply unconvinced.

                                                                       (The Economist – adapted)

                    The Truth About India

Four stupid misconceptions the West needs to shake.

            India is now both rich and poor, and this is the way it is likely to stay. The world’s largest economies in the future — India, China, Brazil — will contain large numbers of poor people, as India does today. It also has many super-rich, like Sunil Mittal, who in the 1970s was running a little factory in Punjab making bicycle parts. In 1995 Mittal launched a telecom company, Airtel, which now has 223 million subscribers across 19 countries, giving him an estimated net worth of $8 billion.

            India’s economic rise is not eating American jobs, as I learned while researching my book. Trade happens in many directions, and the attraction of cheap labor overseas is only part of the story. When Airtel needed to expand fast during the early years of the cell-phone revolution, Mittal realized he would not be able to build infrastructure fast enough to

keep up with demand. So he reverse-outsourced, giving work to foreign companies like Nokia, IBM, and Ericsson. India’s contradictions are less confusing to Indians than they are to foreigners. New technology is not really regarded as alien or “Western,” and tends to quickly become indigenous since India is a flexible and adaptive society.

            Women in India are usually portrayed as oppressed — and often they are — but in some circumstances can have opportunities that they would not have elsewhere. Leading financial institutions in India, like HSBC, RBS, JPMorgan Chase, ICICI, and UBS, are all run by women. Big political names like Sonia Gandhi are not alone. Mayawati Kumari, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was one of nine children, and was raised on the edge of Delhi in a poor family. She now rules a state with a population nearly equal to that of Brazil.