Questões de Concurso

Mysterious ancient cemetery in Egypt could contain a million mummies


A mysterious ancient cemetery in Egypt could contain more than a million mummified human remains, archaeologists have claimed.
Around 1,700 bodies have so far been uncovered at the Fag el-Gamous (Way of the Water Buffalo) site, around 60 miles south of Cairo. But experts believe that countless more are contained in the burial ground.
“We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense, ” said project director Kerry Muhlestein, an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University (BYU), which has been examining the site for around 30 years. They were placed there between the 1st and the 7th centuries AD, but the scale of the site has left many baffled. A nearby village has been deemed too small to warrant such a large cemetery, while the closest major settlements had their own burial grounds.
“It's hard to know where all these people were coming from, ” Professor Muhlestein told Live Science.
Another interesting find was that the corpses appeared to be grouped together by hair colour, with one section containing the remains of those with blonde hair and another for those with red hair. The bodies, which included a man of more than seven feet in height, are thought to be of ordinary citizens, rather than the royalty found at many famous Egyptian sites. They were not buried in coffins, according to Muhlestein, and were in fact mummified not by design but by the arid natural environment.
“The people in the cemetery represent the common man. They are the average people who are usually hard to learn about because they are not very visible in written sources. A lot of their wealth, or the little that they had, was poured into these burials.”
His team discovered objects including glassware, jewellery and linen. The findings were presented to the Scholars Colloquim at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities in Toronto last month.
The Telegraph, London.

(http://www.traveller.com.au/mysterious-ancient-cemetery-in-egypt-could-contain-a-
million-mummies-12aaq7.)

From question 53 to 63, choose the CORRECT answers to fll in the blanks.

Making Performance Budgeting Work: New IMF Book

October 04, 2007

    Member countries will find valuable advice on how to reform their budgeting practices to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public expenditure in a major new work on performance budgeting produced by the Fiscal Affairs Department. The book, Performance Budgeting: Linking Funding and Results (500pp), came off the presses of the top UK publisher Palgrave Macmillan in September.
    Edited by FAD staff member Marc Robinson, the book contains a comprehensive treatment of contemporary performance budgeting practice and theory. In a series of thematic chapters and case studies, the book discusses:
    - The key forms of performance budgeting which [TO IMPLEMENT] around the world - how they differ, and what they have in common points.
    - Lessons from the experience of governments around the world - ranging from OECD nations to developing, middle-income and transition countries - about what forms of performance budgeting work, under what circumstances, and with what implementation strategies.
    - How successful performance budgeting can improve aggregate fiscal discipline.
    - The information requirements of performance budgeting, and
    - The links between performance budgeting and other budgeting and public management reforms.
    Many of the contributors to this work are leaders in performance budgeting implementation in their countries. Others are respected academics and technical experts from the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations. Countries covered in the case studies include the UK, USA, Australia, France, Chile, Spain, Russia, Colombia and Ethiopia.
    One major focus of the book is performance budgeting as a tool for improved expenditure prioritization - that is, for helping to shift limited public resources to the services of greatest social benefit. A key finding is that this type of performance budgeting will only work if the budget process is fundamentally changed so that top politicians and bureaucrats systematically consider expenditure priorities when formulating the budget. This means more than just considering the priorities for new spending. It requires also having mechanisms to systematically review existing spending programs to identify what is ineffective and low priority and can, therefore, be cut. This is what countries such as Chile and the United Kingdom have successfully done, and the United States is currently attempting to achieve with its Program Assessment Rating Tool instrument. Conversely, it is a mistake to believe that merely changing the budget classification and developing performance indicators will in itself improve the allocation of resources in the budget.

(Adapted from http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2007/10/making-performa.html)