TEXTO:
Brazil’s time bomb
President Dilma Rousseff is raising eyebrows with
her plans for Brazil. She is winning agreement even from
the political opposition for an agenda that includes
eradicating absolute poverty, trimming the national
5 budget, and safeguarding freedom of the press. But she
is also shocking everyone with what she plans to ignore:
the social-security time bomb.
Brazil’s social-welfare system is an unrivaled mess.
Though Brazil has one of the world’s youngest
10 populations, it shells out the same share of its GDP (11
percent) as the grayest nations of Europe. Worse, it’s
aging faster than the rich countries ever did — twice as
fast as Europe in the last century. And the problem is
getting worse: federal, state, and local governments write
15 checks to private-sector pensioners worth more than 7
percent of GDP, up from 2.5 percent 30 years ago. With
the economy surging again, even the ballooning
social-security debt seems almost manageable. But to
unleash its full potential, Brazil has little choice but to
20 disarm the pension bomb. While Rousseff says she’s
got no such appetite, she well knows that the average
retirement age in Brazil is a tender 53 … and that France
was in flames because Parliament voted to raise the
retirement age from 60 to 62.
MARGOLIS, Mac. Brazil’s time bomb. Newsweek, Nov 29, 2010, p. 8. GDP: Gross Domestic Product
Fill in the parentheses with T (True) or F (False).
About President Dilma Rousseff, it’s stated in the text that she
( ) is doing exactly what people expected.
( ) has faced strong opposition from politicians.
( ) is reducing the amount of money the government has to spend.
( ) is all against total freedom of the press.
According to the text, the correct sequence, from top to bottom, is:
