Questões de Concurso

TEXT I

Beware the power of the blog

Companies may not like blogs, but if they ignore them
they may be inviting some PR disasters

    The number of blogs on the internet is doubling every five months, according to blog-tracking site Technorati. The total is now around 20 million, with around 1.3 million posts made each day. Most are no more interesting than overhearing another person's telephone call, but there are exceptions that can have a remarkable impact.

(from http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/comment/ 2145491/beware-power-blog, retrieved on September 24th, 2008)

Atenção: Para responder às questões de números 66 a 70, considere o texto a seguir:
Facebook Announces Its Third Pillar “Graph Search” That Gives You Answers, Not Links Like Google
DREW OLANOFF JOSH CONSTINE, COLLEEN TAYLOR, INGRID LUNDEN
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

    Today at Facebook’s press event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced its latest product, called Graph Search.
    Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different.
    He explained the difference between web search and Graph Search. “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give
you links that might have answers.” Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a “very hard technical problem,”
according to Zuckerberg.
    Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer.” For
example, you could ask Graph Search “Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?” Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in “very early beta.” People, photos, places and interests are the focus for the first iteration of the product.
    Facebook Graph Search is completely personalized. Tom Stocky of the search team explains he gets unique results for a search of “friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter.” Then, “If anyone else does this search they get a completely different set of results. C  someone had the same set of friends as me, the results would be different [because we have different relationships with our friends].”
    You can also use Graph Search for recruiting. Stocky says if he was looking for people to join the team at Facebook, he could search for NASA Ames employees who are friends with people at Facebook. “If I wanted to reach out and recruit them, I could see who their friends are at Facebook. To refine them I can look for people who wrote they are “founders.”
    Photos is another big part of Graph Search. Results are sorted by engagement so you see the ones with the most likes and comments at the top. For example, Lars Rasmussen, Facebook engineer, searched for “photos of my friends taken at National Parks.” He got a  gorgeous page of photos from Yosemite, Machu Pichu, and other parks.

(Adapted from http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/facebook-announces-its-third-pillar-graph-search/)

Atenção: Para responder às questões de números 61 a 65, considere o texto a seguir:
For taxpayer advocate, a familiar refrain
By Michelle Singletary, Published: January 15, 2013

    It’s not nice to tell people “I told you so.” But if anybody has the right to say that, it’s Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate.
    Olson recently submitted her annual report to Congress and top on her list of things that need to be fixed is the complexity of the tax
code, which she called the most serious problem facing taxpayers.
    Let’s just look at the most recent evidence of complexity run amok. The Internal Revenue Service had to delay the tax-filing season so it could update forms and its programming to accommodate recent changes made under the American Taxpayer Relief Act. The IRS won’t start processing individual income tax returns until Jan. 30. Yet one thing remains unchanged − the April 15 tax deadline.
    Because of the new tax laws, the IRS also had to release updated income-tax withholding tables for 2013. These replace the tables issued Dec. 31. Yes, let’s just keep making more work for the agency that is already overburdened. Not to mention the extra work for employers, who have to use the revised information to correct the amount of Social Security tax withheld in 2013. And they have to make that correction in order to withhold a larger Social Security tax of 6.2 percent on wages, following the expiration of the payroll tax cut in effect for 2011 and 2012.
    Oh, and there was the near miss with the alternative minimum tax that could have delayed the tax filing season to late March. The AMT was created to target high-income taxpayers who were claiming so many deductions that they owed little or no income tax. Olson and many others have complained for years that the AMT wasn’t indexed for inflation.
    “Many middle- and upper-middle-class taxpayers pay the AMT, while most wealthy taxpayers do not, and thousands of millionaires pay
...A.... income tax at all,” Olson said.
    As part of the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, the AMT is now fixed, a move that the IRS was anticipating. It had already decided to program its systems on the assumption that an AMT patch would be passed, Olson said. Had the agency not taken the risk, the time it would have taken to update the systems “would have brought about the most chaotic filing season in memory,” she said in her report.
    The tax code contains almost 4 million words. Since 2001, there have been about 4,680 changes, or an average of more than one change a day. What else troubles Olson? Here’s what:
    − Nearly 60 percent of taxpayers hire paid preparers, and another 30 percent rely on commercial software to prepare their returns.
    − Many taxpayers don’t really know how their taxes are computed and what rate of tax they pay.
    − The complex code makes tax fraud ...B... to detect.
    − Because the code is so complicated, it creates an impression that many taxpayers are not paying their fair share. This reduces trust in the system and perhaps leads some people to cheat. Who wants to be the sucker in this game? So someone might not declare all of his income, rationalizing that millionaires get to use the convoluted code to greatly reduce their tax liability.
    − In fiscal year 2012, the IRS received around 125 million calls. But the agency answered only about two out of three calls from people trying to reach a live person, and those taxpayers had to wait, on average, about 17 minutes to get through.
    “I hope 2013 brings about fundamental tax simplification,” Olson pleaded in her report. She urged Congress to reassess the need for the tax breaks we know as income exclusions, exemptions, deductions and credits. It’s all these tax advantage breaks that complicate the code. If done right, and without reducing revenue, tax rates could be substantially lowered in exchange for ending tax breaks, she said.

(Adapted from http://js.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-taxpayer-advocate-a-familiar-refrain/2013/01/15/a10327ce-5f59-11e2-b05a-605528f6b712_story.html)