CEBRASPE – 2014 – MRE – DIPLOMATA – 1ª FASE CACD – LÍNGUA INGLESA – CONCURSO PÚBLICO – MINISTÉRIO DAS RELAÇÕES EXTERIORES – PROVA COM GABARITO.

Welcome back to another post!

➧ PROVA DE LÍNGUA INGLESA: CEBRASPE-2014-MRE-DIPLOMATA-1ª FASE CACD, aplicação em 06/04/2014.

➧ BANCA/ORGANIZADOR:

➧ PADRÃO/COMPOSIÇÃO DA PROVA: 13 Questões totalizando 52 itens do tipo CORRETO (C) ou ERRADO (E).

➧ GABARITO:

01-CEXC, 02-ECCE, 03-CCCE, 04-ECXE, 05-EEXE

06-CXCE, 07-EXCE, 08-CEEC, 09-ECEE, 10-EECE

11-EECE, 12-EECC, 13-EEEC

➧ VOCABULÁRIO:

➧ TEXTOS 1 e 2:

➧ TEXTO 1:

Book Review 1 – 

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

by Laurent Gayer

           

With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta — “protection” money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature", has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.
           

Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite — and sometimes through — violence.

Source:<www.amazon.com>.

Retrieved on:March 2, 2014.

➧ TEXTO 2:

Book Review 2 –

The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

           

The Beijing-Islamabad axis plays a central role in Asia's geopolitics, from India's rise to the prospects for a post-American Afghanistan, from the threat of nuclear terrorism to the continent's new map of mines, ports and pipelines. China is Pakistan's great economic hope and its most trusted military partner; Pakistan is the battleground for China's encounters with Islamic militancy and the heart of its efforts to counter-balance the emerging US-India partnership. For decades, each country has been the other's only 'all-weather' friend. Yet the relationship is still little understood. The wildest claims about it are widely believed, while many of its most dramatic developments are hidden from the public eye. This book sets out the recent history of Sino-Pakistani ties and their ramifications for the West, for India, for Afghanistan, and for Asia as a whole. It tells the stories behind some of its most sensitive aspects, including Beijing's support for Pakistan’s nuclear program, China’s dealings with the Taliban, and the Chinese military’s planning for crises in Pakistan. It describes a relationship increasingly shaped by Pakistan's internal strife, and the dilemmas China faces between the need for regional stability and the imperative for strategic competition with India and the USA.

Source:<www.amazon.com>.

Retrieved on:March 2, 2014

01 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the information conveyed by the two book reviews, 

judge the items right (C) or wrong (E).

1. The first review implies that the book author’s point of view is explicit in the narrative, whereas the second indicates the book presents an impartial account of the state of affairs.
2. Though based on real facts, both books belong to the fiction genre.
3. The two books approach political issues in Pakistan from an international perspective.
4. The books are connected in as much as the issues discussed in the first one influence Pakistan's international relationships.

02 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on Book Review 1,

judge the items right (C) or wrong (E).

1. The conflicts and violence in Karachi contrast with what happens in the country as a whole.
2. The book tries to clarify Karachi’s enigmatic situation.
3. The book shows a view of the city of Karachi that is different from the media's.
4. Karachi has become ungovernable due to its warfare constant condition.

03 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on Book Review 2,

judge the items right (C) or wrong (E).

1. The word "wildest" (l.11) indicates that the claims the reviewer refers to lack basis or evidence.
2. Mutual interests between China and Pakistan include economic as well as military issues.
3. The book scrutinizes the relationship between China and Pakistan as well as some of their internal issues.
4. The book explains the military and political tensions between China and Pakistan on one side, and India and the USA on the other.

➧ TEXTO 3: Text for questions from 04 to 06.

           

In addition to her impending, and no doubt ultimately successful, quest for Senate confirmation, Janet Yellen will have a lot on her plate in the coming months. Now that House Republicans and Senate Democrats have come to yet another temporary agreement on the budget and debt ceiling, there still exists another threat to the economy: The Federal Reserve’s temptation to pursue an overly ambitious monetary policy aimed at offsetting the damage to the economy arising from poorly conducted fiscal policy. Now that President Obama’s Fed Chairman nominee has been announced, the Fed needs to shift its focus from wondering who will lead it to what its realistic goals can be. Substantially different views are held by Fed hawks and doves.

           

The economy is still on uncertain footing, and public frustration with the Fed is increasing, especially since the Maytaper into September-no-taper serious misstep. The Fed seems16 to be making up policy as it goes along. It has become distracted with trying to fix problems it is not well-equipped to handle, including sustained lower unemployment and a faster pace of growth than is obtainable during a period of fiscal consolidation and weak global growth.

           

The Fed's post-financial crisis mission creep, since 2008, has fueled an unhealthy codependence between it and the market, akin to the infamous pre-crisis "Greenspan put," whereby the Greenspan Fed was expected to — and did — step in to support financial markets whenever there arose a threat to rising asset markets. Markets assume the Fed can and will fix any problems, such as the latest episode of Washington’s fiscal policy bungling, that might harm the economy or depress stock prices. Once necessary, but now dangerous, improvisations of monetary policy — quantitative easing and forward guidance in particular — have become alternately ineffective and counter productive, as the recent tapering trauma has shown. Yellen, as the primary author of the Fed’s new communication strategy, needs to identify ways to improve the Fed’s communication with markets and the public.

           

The Fed has come a long way since its founding one hundred years ago. Its original role was to be the lender of last resort in a financial crisis. That role, as a temporary emergency supplier of liquidity in a panic, has continued and should continue going forward. But in the postfinancial crisis period, the Fed has been forced to accommodate the extra cash demands of households and firms confronting a world of elevated uncertainty about the direction and conduct of monetary and fiscal policy. That is because higher uncertainty has forced firms and wealthy households to self-insure against possible bad outcomes and to preserve optionality in the face of unforeseen shocks and opportunities.

           

Failure by the Fed to satisfy higher cash demands worsened the Great Depression in the United States and the deflationary lost decade in Japan. These elevated, postcrisis cash needs explain why the Fed’s rapid additions to the monetary base through quantitative easing have been followed by disinflation, not inflation, as many have predicted. Chairman Yellen will have to be vigilant to avoid tightening too soon,while uncertainty remains high.

Makin, John H. The challenge of a lifetime. In: The international economy. Fall 2013, p. 10-11. Available at: <http://www.internationaleconomy.com>.

Adapted. Retrieved on: March 1, 2014

04 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the article (text 3), decide if the items are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. According to Makin, Americans are dissatisfied with the Federal Reserve because of its inability to cater for unemployment and slow economic growth.
2. Fed members differ as to what the goals for the Federal Reserve shall be from now on.
3. The author compares the Federal Reserve’s post-financial crisis policy with the pre-financial policy which consisted of supporting asset markets financially whenever they were at risk.
4. Despite the wrong decisions taken by the Federal Reserve, the US economy is heading to stability.

05 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Considering the information about the Federal Reserve conveyed in the article (text 3),

decide if the items are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. It played an important role to lessen the disastrous effects during both the Great Depression and the Lost Decade in Japan.
2. The tapering changes made in 2013 showed the Federal Reserve is acting according to a global plan of financial restructuring.
3. Its procedures to counterbalance the consequences of the government’s fiscal policy are a threat to the country's economy.
4. It has moved away from its sole original mission of supporting the financial system in times of crisis.

06 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the article (text 3), decide if the items are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. The word "creep" (l.22) refers to widening of the Federal Reserve’s mission in the post-financial crisis.
2. By saying that Janet Yellen "will have a lot on her plate in the coming months"(l.2-3), the author implies she will have too many issues to worry about or deal with during her chairmanship.
3. The use of "hawks and doves"(l.13) to refer to the Fed members illustrates the extent of the divergence between the two opposing groups in the organization.
4. "bungling"(l.29) can be replaced by recovery without changes in the original meaning of the sentence.

➧ TEXTO 4: Text for questions from 07 to 09.

        

Bertrand Russell once predicted that the socialization of reproduction — the supersession of the family by the state — would “make sex love itself more trivial,” encourage “a certain triviality in all personal relations,” and “make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death.” At first glance, recent developments appear to have refuted the first part of this prediction. Americans today invest personal relations, particularly the relations between men and women, with undiminished emotional importance. The decline of childrearing as a major preoccupation has freed sex from its bondage to procreation and made it possible for people to value erotic life for its own sake. As the family shrinks to the marital unit, it can be argued that men and women respond more readily to each other’s emotional needs, instead of living vicariously through their offspring. The marriage contract having lost its binding character, couples now find it possible, according to many observers, to ground sexual relations in something more solid than legal compulsion. In short, the growing determination to live for the moment, whatever it may have done to the relations between parents and children, appears to have established the preconditions of a new intimacy between men and women.

         

This appearance is an illusion. The cult of intimacy conceals a growing despair of finding it. Personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened.

  

The inability "to take an interest in anything after one’s own death," which gives such urgency to the pursuit of close personal encounters in the present, makes intimacy more elusive than ever. The same developments that have weakened the tie between parents and children have also undermined relations between men and women. Indeed the deterioration of marriage contributes in its own right to the deterioration of care for the young.

This last point is so obvious that only a strenuous propaganda on behalf of "open marriage" and "creative divorce" prevents us from grasping it. It is clear, for example, that the growing incidence of divorce, together with the ever-present possibility that any given marriage will end in collapse, adds to the instability of family life and deprives the child of a measure of emotional security. Enlightened opinion diverts attention from this general fact by insisting that in specific cases, parents may do more harm to their children by holding a marriage together than by dissolving it. More often the husband abandons his children to the wife whose company he finds unbearable, and the wife smothers the children with incessant yet perfunctory attentions. This particular solution to the problem of marital strain has become so common that the absence of the father impresses many observers as the most striking fact about the contemporary family. Under these conditions, a divorce in which the mother retains custody of her children merely ratifies the existing state of affairs — the effective emotional desertion of his family by the father. But the reflection that divorce often does no more damage to children than marriage itself hardly inspires rejoicing.

Christopher Lasch. The Cult of Narcissism.

Abacus, Londres, 1980 p. 320-322 (adapted).

07 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the text, decide if the following statements about the author's assessment of the family situation in America are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. Engaging in sexual intercourse exclusively for pleasure enhances mutual affection between individuals thus creating a healthier relationship not only between the couple but also between them and their children.
2. It is an oversimplification to attribute the destruction of the basic fabric of the traditional family to the search for sex for its own sake and to the increasing growth of the rate of divorce.
3. The seeds of the destruction of the family in America can be ultimately found in people’s inability to rise above the trivialization of personal relations.
4. The emergence of the nuclear family is the product of recent developments in social behavior.

08 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the text,

decide if the following statements are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. Living one's children’s lives and dreams used to be a far more widespread feature of traditional families in the US than it is nowadays.
2. Men and women in the US have become increasingly aware that it takes money to improve their personal relations.
3. The fewer children a couple has, the less binding the nature of their marriage vows becomes.
4. The less emphasis Americans place on the procreative role of sex, the more likely they are to succeed in enjoying playful sex.

👍 Gabarito  CEEC 

09 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the text,

decide if the following statements about the author's position about the trivialization of personal relations are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. He is non-committal about it, assuming this is an inescapable trend in contemporary American life.
2. He is critical of it because he believes it led to the loosening of the bond between parents and children.
3. He is receptive to it for he believes traditional child raising consumes a disproportionate amount of a couple’s efforts and energy.
4. He has mixed feelings about it.

➧ TEXTO 5: Text for questions from 10 to 14.

      

In the pre-dawn of June 16th, a lone voice broke the stillness. The mullahs summoned the men to prayers; for two hours the priests called and the men responded in a gathering rhythmic crescendo to psych them up to fight and die. The defenders crouched behind their makeshift barricades, listening to the eerie chants rising and falling in the darkness beyond. La Vallete had sent reinforcements across and the defenders, if already weary, were well ordered. Each man had his duty and his post. They were grouped in threes: one arquebusier to two pikemen. Large quantities of fire weapons had been stock piled, rocks gathered, and quantities of bread soaked in wine. Barrels of water stood behind the parapets into which men torched by adhesive fire could hurl themselves.

           

As the sun rose, there was a searching barrage of fire 'so that the earth and the air shook', and then Mustapha signalled the advance along a huge crescent. Suleiman's imperial standard was unfurled; a turban was hoisted on a spear, farther down the line there was an answering puff of smoke. An extraordinary array of banners and shields were visible surging forward, ‘painted with extraordinary designs; some with devices of different birds, some with scorpions and with Arab lettering’. In the front rank men ran wildly towards the walls, calling out the name of Allah in a crescendo of shouts. From the battlements came the Christian countercalls: Jesus, Mary, St Michael, St James and St George — ‘according to the devotion of each man’. There was a furious push towards the bridge; scaling ladders were put to the walls and battle was joined. The whole front was a struggling mass of humanity fighting hand to hand.

Roger Crowley. Empires of the Sea, The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580, Faber and Faber, 2008, p. 1-2.

10 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the text, decide if the following statements concerning the author’s intentions are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. He describes in detail the high standards the military had attained in the fields of war tactics and weaponry by the time of the Crusades.
2. He aims mainly at creating an atmosphere that brings to his readers’ minds all the colours, sounds, smells and actions of a particular event.
3. He describes some of the build-up to a battle between adherents of Islam and Christians.
4. He expresses strong criticism of both Christians and Muslims' bigotry and religious fanaticism.

11 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Decide if the statements about the following sentence are right (C) or wrong (E):

"Barrels of water stood behind the parapets into which men torched by adhesive fire could hurl themselves"(R.12-13).

1. Even in a situation of conflict, water is essential for soldiers' personal hygiene.
2. Soldiers would pour boiling water on their enemies if they tried to climb up the walls of their fortress.
3. Men who had been set fire to needed water badly to relieve the pain caused by burns.
4. Soldiers needed this water to quench their thirst since this battle probably took place in a dry place.

12 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Based on the text,

decide if the following statements about the battle ground are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. Christian soldiers, unlike their Muslim counterparts, adopted a clearly syncretic approach as they sought divine protection.
2. Standards and banners were not key items in the war paraphernalia Christians had at their disposal in medieval times.
3. The actual fight in the battlefield erupted only when daylight broke.
4. Mustapha is probably one of Suleiman's generals.

13 – (CESPE-2014-DIPLOMATA-TPS)

Concerning the battle proper,

decide based on the text if the following statements are right (C) or wrong (E).

1. The Muslim preference for animals such as birds and scorpions suggests that they are wild warriors.
2. At the time of the battle described, there was a widely held belief among catholics that female saints were of little avail in war. 
3. The Muslims seemed to be defending a fortified building.
4. Both groups sought spiritual and psychological support in their respective religions to engage in warfare.