Skip to main content

Passage 1

In the following  paragraphs, identify the topic and the main idea.

Even by the standards of ASEAN, it was a dismal performance. The leaders of the other nine members of the Association of south-east Asian Nations used their summit in Bali this week to ladle praise on Myanmar for its "positive" and "pragmatic" recent policies. These, it appeared, meant the transfer of Myanmar's most famous citizens, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, from prison to house arrest, and the publication of a "road map" for democracy. Since a return to democracy  has been promised by Myanmar's current junta ever since it took power in 1998, and since Miss Suu Kyi won an election in 1990 that has never been recognised, the Myanmar map looks as forlorn as the Middle Eastern one.

The disgraceful treatment meted out to Miss Suu Kyi is only the most obvious outrage committed by South-East Asia's most repressive and incompetent government. The generals do not just imprisons thousands of political prisoners: they have turned their country into a place where life expectancy has collapsed to around 55, and growth has vanished. The World Health Organisation ranks the efficacy of Myanmar's health system at 190 out of 191 nations.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Women are, Indeed, The Fairer Sex

  Fairness has been coloured by its association with creams, lotions and discrimination against darker skin tones. However, the word does have several other non-racial connotations, and in that context it is heartening to note that the findings of recent research in the US corroborates that women - Regardless of ethnicity- are indeed the fairer sex. And the difference is more than cosmetic, as among the 3.3 lakh people surveyed in 67 countries, women outnumbered men on prioritising fairness, purity(of intention, that is ) and compassion when it came to taking ethical decisions. While the finding makes a case for putting more women in places where fairnessvl counts, the fact that the divide between the sexes on this matter is more pronounced in the supposedly more gender-equal western nations comes as a surprise. After all, the conventional wisdom is that shades of opinion on fairness are more fraught in developing economies. Another recent study conducted in the US concluded that w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Europe's plague Joke Renaissance

 Laughing at the face of coronavirus is getting contagious in that continent With much of Europe abd Britain getting back under lockdown covers with Covid relurking,  the cradle of dodgy pandemic jokes is having a renaissance. The chaps who brought the world the Teutonic Bubonic Plague Jokebook— the Black Death supposedly the prime reason for Germans losing their sense of humour — are already guffawing with fear. The strategy this time seems to be any dearth of mirth will be the birth of death. So, as cracks like the corona virus also keeping their versions of pub and restaurant timings —it's rule-abiding Europe for the critters too, you see— go viral, who knows, one may even have a new healthy obsession with Eros and Thanatos, rather than a prolonged taste for organic food and EU Rules of Origin Laws.  Remember, this is the continent of the original Coveni, Covidi, Covici( I came down with Covid , I saw Covid, I conqured Covid), not to mention the very name ' Coronavirus...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple Solutions For No-Fly Zones

 The unfortunate incident last week of the main in France who had a narrow escape when his house burned down because his attempt to swat a fly with an electric racket ignited a leaking gas cylinder underlines a the dangers if complicating simple tasks. If not an old-fashioned swatter, a rolled-up newspaper could have accomplished the deep more efficiently with considering the fate of that fly remains unknown. The efficacy of old-fashioned methods to deal with annoying flies has been immortalised in the Brothers Grimm 1812 tale, The Valiant Little Tailor, who dispatched no less than 'seven at one blow' and leveraged that feat to eventually become a king. An American cartoonist named Rube Goldberg became a by-word for the propensity to invent convoluted contraptions to perform simple tasks because of his sketches bon the subject. His cartoon Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin, published in 1931 has become a meme for complex contrivances; but nearly a century bof techno...
Post a Comment
Read more