Brazil S Roofless Reclaim the Cities

Olympiad 2

Task I

Reading

You are going to read a newspaper article about roofless people. Eight paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is an example at the beginning (0).

BRAZIL’S ROOFLESS RECLAIM THE CITIES

Every day at 4 am, 18-year-old Julienne Cunha wakes to fetch water for her family. She climbs from her bed in the poky, plywood shack she shares with six relatives and collects her bucket. In the remote northern fishing village of Alcantara where she was born, it would be nothing out of the ordinary. But these days, Julienne lives on the 20th floor of a tower block in the of the wealthiest districts of Sao Paulo, the world’s third largest city.

Water doesn’t reach Ms Cunha’s part of Prestes Maia, so every day she treks down its spiraling staircase to collect it for relatives including her brother, sister and two-month-old son.

The roofless movement is the urban equivalent to Brazil’s Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Movement, which has spearheaded the campaign for land reform since the 1980s.

Eight years after its foundation, the MSTC is part of an ever growing coalition fighting for the rights of Brazil’s urban poor, under the umbrella of the Frente de Luta por Moradia or Pro-housing Front.

Walking through Prestes Maia is like taking a road trip through Brazil. On every floor a different accent hangs in the air; the exaggerated vowels of the baianos, who swapped Salvador’s favelas for the bustle of Sao Paulo; the staccato consonants of the pernambucanos who fled the arid backlands of Brazil’s north-east in search of work; and, on the sixth floor the portunhol of Bolivian immigrants who flick between Spanish and Portuguese as they describe their fight for survival in the ocupacion.

At first glance Prestes Maia, which sem-teto members occupied in 2002, resembles a chaotic, multi-storey shantytown; cardboard spews out of its cracked windows, graffiti litter its walls and children rattle through its wide corridors on bicycles.

Sao Paulo, like many of Brazil’s large urban centres, is a city crying out for housing reform. According to the UN it has 39,289 abandoned buildings. At the same time, says the Sao Paulo-based Social Network of Justice and Human Rights, there are an estimated 15,000 homeless people here with many thousands more unable to afford decent housing outside the city’s favelas, where around 2 million are thought to live.

Now, there years on and mired in an ongoing corruption scandal, Mr da Silva is coming under fire for backtracking on his promises to Brazil’s social movements. Although Workers party propaganda still adorns many of Prestes Maia’s plaster walls, anger is growing that the “shoeshine president” has not done more to help the country’s poor.

The area’s housing secretary, Orlando Almeida, told a magazine recently that the centre’s poor should be relocated from inner-city tenements to the city’s outskirts. A new project to revitalize parts of central Sao Paulo, including one neighbourhood known as Cracolandia (Crackland), aims to redevelop the area almost exclusively for the middle and upper class. Human rights groups say the plans will marginalize further Sao Paulo’s ever-growing underclass.

“But our fight isn’t just for housing”, she says. “It’s for healthcare, old people’s rights, employment, leisure and schooling. People don’t know their rights. And our fight is to make sure they do”.

A. Looking out from her 11th floor window at the skyscrapers across the horizon Ms Fonseca talks of the sem-teto’s plans to carry out a wave of occupations across Sao Paulo in the coming months.

B. Before becoming president, Luiz Inacio da Silva of the Workers party promised this would all change.

C. The MST defends Brazil’s impoverished rural workers and reclaims unproductive land for the dispossessed. The Movimento de Sem-Teto do Centro, MSTC, on the other hand, reclaims buildings for the urban homeless and for low-income workers, many of whom work in the informal economy.

D. But the community is meticulously organized. Residents contribute R $ 20 (£ 5) a mouth to the upkeep of the building, and a rota system exists for cleaning each floor’s communal bathroom.

E. A resident of Prestes Maia, a colossal abandoned clothes factory that towers over central Sao Paulo, Julienne is one of the youngest members of Brazil’s sem-teto or “roofless” movement – an urban coalition growing in cities across the country.

F. “There are lots of people here with different cultures, different ways of life”, explains 49-year-old Jomarina Abreu Pires da Fonseca, an MSTC coordinator, at her home on the 11th floor of Prestes Maia. “Someone has to try to keep order”, she adds, grinning.

G. “We are petistas [supporters of the Workers party], but we have to say that he has done nothing for the social movements. We’ve tried to put pressure on him but what we hoped for hasn’t happened”, says Ms Fonseca, as two delivery men haul the occupation’s latest acquisition – a new washing machine – up the last of 10 flights of crumbling stairs.

H. Prestes Maia, Sao Paulo’s biggest occupation with 22 storeys in total, is home to 468 families; around 3,000 people from all over South America cram into improvised shacks constructed in what was once office space.

Task II

English in use

1. Error correction.

In most lines of the following text, there is one wrong word. It is either grammatically incorrect or it doesn’t fit in with the sense of the text. For each numbered line 1-13, write the wrong word in the space. Some lines are correct. Indicate these with a tick (v). The exercise begins with two examples.

0 Intelligent test score is a test, expressed as the intelligent

00 choronological age for which a given level of performance is, v

1 average or typically. An individual’s mental age is then divided ______

2 by his chronological age and being multiplied by 100, yielding ______

3 an intelligence quotient (IQ). Thus, a subject which mental ______

4 and chronological ages is identical has an IQ of 100, or average ______

5 intelligence. However, if 10-year-old has a mental age of 13 ______

6 his IQ is 130, well above average. Since the average mentalage of ______

7 adulterers does not increase past age 18, an adult taking an IQ test is ______

8 assigned the chronological age of 18. Mental age was first defined ______

9 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who introduced the ______

10 intelligence test in 1905. That is why the variation in scores for different ______

11 age group taking graded tests increases roughly in proportion to the ______

12 increase in age, mental ages cannot be used accurately to compare______

13the basis ability of children of different chronological ages. ______

1. For questions 1-16, read the text below and decide which answer A,B,C or D best fits each space. There is an example at the beginning (0).

Narcissus

Narcissus in Greek 0) A, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Leiriope; he was distinguished for his 1)… . His mother was told that he would have a long 2)…, provided he never looked upon his own 3)…. His rejection, 4)…, of the love of the nymph Echo or of his lover Ameinias drew upon him the vengeance of the gods. He fell in love with his own 5)… in the waters of a 6)… and pined away (or killed himself); the 7)… that bears his name sprang up where he 8)…. According to another source, Narcissus, to 9)… himself for the death of his 10)… twin sister, his exact counterpart, sat 11)… into the spring to recall her features. The 12)… may have derived from the ancient Greek 13)… that it was unlucky or even 14)… to see one’s own reflection. In psychiatry and especially psychoanalysis, the 15)… narcissism denotes an excessive degree of self-esteem or self-involvement, a condition that is usually a form of emotional 16)….

1. Read the sentences below and decide which answer A,B,C or D best fits each blank.

1. Beautiful girls are other envied, … ?

A. are they

B. isn’t they

C. are they not

D. aren’t they

2. This cup is twice as … as that one.

A. hot

B. hotter

C. hoter

D. the hottest

3. These letters were written by …

A. their self

B. their own

C. theirs

D. themselves

4. I can’t find her anywhere. She must … the town.

A. left

B. have left

C. had left

D. has left

5. They will … to the party after the exams next spring.

A. invite

B. be inviting

C. be invited

D. been invited

6. What … if you were more attentive?

A. wouldn’t you make

B. wouldn’t you made

C. wouldn’t you making

D. wouldn’t you making

7. He called … boy and asked him: “How much does … cake cost?” – “Threepence, sir”, - answered … boy.

A. the, a, the

B. the, the, the

C. -, the, -

D. a, - , the

8. I had a slight irritation in my throat. You … less.

A. shouldn’t smoke

B. should smoke

C. should have smoked

D. should be smoking

9. He … morning exercises every day, but now he has forgotten about it.

A. was used to do

B. used to do

C. is used to doing

D. used have done

10. Make him … louder.

A. to speak

B. speaking

C. be speaking

D. speak

11. The cook smelled the meat … .

A. proper

B. properly

C. properlly

D. properfuly

12. There are so … people on the ice!

A. much

B. many

C. little

D. a little

13. Their manager can solve … difficult problems.

A. so

B. such

C. such a

D. so a

14. She was told … it in Russian.

A. to tell

B. to say

C. to speak

D. to talk

15. It’s the first I … such an interesting story.

A. heard

B. hear

C. have heard

D. am hearing

16. It’s no use … like that to me.

A. talk

B. talking

C. having talked

D. have talked

1. Using idioms.

Complete each sentence with a suitable idiom. Use each only once.

1. Set one’s mind at rest
2. Refresh one’s memory
3. From rags to riches
4. Raised eyebrows at
5. Ring true

1. It was a clever excuse but it didn’t really … .
2. The talent of this brilliant young footballer raised him … .
3. I looked at the map to … of the route.
4. The letter from her daughter … .
5. There were a lot of … the news of the minister’s dismissal.

5. Word formation.

Complete each sentence with the correct from of the word given at the end. As you do the exercise think about the kind of word that is needed in the sentence – verb, noun, or adjective.

1. Flowers … bees. attractive

2. You should be more … with your money. care

3. Is there an …? explain

4. They consulted a very … lawyer. experience

5. These birds … their nests out of straw. building

6. We are … of our district. pride

7. I was at the … . try

8. This piece of music was … for the piano. composition

9. The youg man was very … to the old lady and did everything for her.

attention

10. Shall I make the …? Robert, this is Julia. introduce

Task III

Writing

You have decided to enter a short article writing competition in a local newspaper. Write your essay of 180 words.

Drugs have become a major social problem in many parts of the world. Discuss the consequences of drug abuse and ways to deal with the problem.