Questões de Concurso

Two Meals and Not Always Square

    With budgets tight, states and local governments have been looking at prisons − and prison food − as a place to save money. Three days a week, Georgia now serves inmates only two meals. And across the country, there have been increasing reports of substandard food. This is inhumane. Adequate meals should be a nonnegotiable part of a civilized penal system. It is also bad policy. Researchers have found a connection between poor food quality and discipline problems and violence.
    Georgia has [CONNECTOR] decided to save on staff costs by serving just two meals on Friday, as it already did on Saturday and Sunday. The state says it gives prisoners the same number of calories on days when one meal is skipped. Even if it does − and some prisoners’ advocates are skeptical − it can be oppressive to go so long without eating.
    In Alabama earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the Morgan County sheriff locked up in his own jail for contempt for failing to adequately feed his inmates. Alabama allows sheriffs to keep food money they do not spend, and the sheriff reportedly pocketed more than $200,000 over three years.
    Prisoners’ rights advocates say they are receiving an increasing number of complaints from inmates nationwide who report being served spoiled or inedible food or inadequate portions. Earlier this year, a riot at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas caused heavy damage to a prison building. Inmates said it was prompted in part by poor food.
    Cutbacks in food could violate inmates’ constitutional rights, notes Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, if they create a substantial risk of serious harm − a particular concern for inmates with diabetes and other illnesses.
    If states and localities want to save money on corrections, they should reduce their prison and jail populations. The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has almost one-quarter of its prisoners. Many are in for nonviolent crimes that could be punished in more constructive, and less costly, ways. If governments decide to put inmates behind bars, they have to give them adequate food − which means no less than three healthy meals a day.

(Adapted from The New York Times, June 20, 2009)

State Income-Tax Revenues Sink
By ERICA ALINI

    State income-tax revenue fell 26% in the first four months of 2009 compared to the same period last year, according to a survey of states by the nonprofit Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
    The report, conducted by the public-policy research arm of the State University of New York, is one of the most up-todate measures of how deep the recession is digging into Americans' wallets and, consequently, state coffers.
    States are required by law to balance the budget, so lower tax revenues will translate in service cuts, rather than red ink. Already states such as Kansas are slowing the payment of income-tax refunds and delaying payments to local school districts, according to the report.
    Withholdings from the first four months of 2009 were down 6.9% from the same period in 2008, signaling that "many people had a very bad start of the year" with lower salaries and wages, says Don Boyd, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute.
    During April alone, withholding tax collections declined by 2.2 percent compared with 2008. Only five of 37 reporting states had increases in withholding for the January-April months. The five states reporting growth in withholding taxes for the first four months of 2009 are Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, West Virginia and Utah. Arizona, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York had the largest declines in withholding tax collections, with over a 10 percent drop for January-April of 2009.
    The time span notably includes the April 15 deadline for filing taxes, a critical time for states to collect revenues.
    The sharp decline was a rude awakening for many states, both because income tax is the main source of revenue and because the drop was deeper than [VERB] It was steepest in Arizona, South Carolina, Michigan, California and Vermont. Only Utah, Alabama and North Dakota posted gains.
    For most states, the fiscal year starts on July 1, so many were "in the process of dotting i's and crossing t's" in their 2009-2010 budget agreements when the bad news came. Most states will probably need to square the budget with midyear cuts, the report predicts.
    The plunge in income-tax revenue means some states may have to revise budget agreements for 2009-2010 and may still face gaping holes in 2011, when federal stimulus money runs out.

(Adapted from Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2009)

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)