Questões de Vestibular de Inglês - Passado perfeito | Past perfect
Foram encontradas 9 questões
Q1279289
Inglês
In the sentence “Both Mr. Calheiros, the head
of the Senate, and Mr. Cunha, the head of the
lower house, have asserted that they are innocent
in connection to the bribery scheme at Petrobras”
(lines 138-142), the verbs in the clauses are
respectively in the
Ano: 2012
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2012 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 1º Dia - 2ª fase |
Q1278818
Inglês
Texto associado
T E X T
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle MartinRhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of PompeuFabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).
In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
Source: www.nytimes.com
In the following question, some sentences
from the text have been modified to fit certain
grammatical structures.
In terms of verb tense, the sentences “In a
study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with
Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, bilingual
subjects performed better than monolinguals.” and
“The families had brought up the children in a
bilingual environment.” are in the
Ano: 2013
Banca:
UECE-CEV
Órgão:
UECE
Prova:
UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Inglês - 1º Dia |
Q1261831
Inglês
Texto associado
TEXT
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data
science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by
most accounts this hot new field promises to
revolutionize industries from business to
government, health care to academia.
The field has been spawned by the
enormous amounts of data that modern technologies
create — be it the online behavior of Facebook
users, tissue samples of cancer patients,
purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime
statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians
of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use
mathematical models to analyze it and create
narratives or visualizations to explain it, then
suggest how to use the information to make
decisions.
In the last few years, dozens of programs
under a variety of names have sprung up in
response to the excitement about Big Data, not to
mention the six-figure salaries for some recent
graduates. In the fall, Columbia will offer new
master’s and certificate programs heavy on data.
The University of San Francisco will soon graduate
its charter class of students with a master’s in
analytics.
Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at
Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data
Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course
with “data science” in the title). She described the
data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist
software engineer statistician.” And added: “The
best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who
ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with
unstructured situations and trying to find structure
in them.”
Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data
scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in
quantitative methods in the social sciences and
plans to use her degree for government service. She
discovered the possibilities while working as a
corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue
Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return
data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent
filings, or cull national security databases to spot
suspicious activity.
Some of her classmates are hoping to apply
their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’
browsing history is gold.
“This is a generation of kids that grew up
with data science around them — Netflix telling
them what movies they should watch, Amazon
telling them what books they should read — so this
is an academic interest with real-world applications,”
said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied
mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new
Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,”
he added, “they know it will make them
employable.”
Universities can hardly turn out data
scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase
the number of graduates with skills handling large
amounts of data by as much as 60 percent,
according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute.
There will be almost half a million jobs in five
years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified
data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million
executives and support staff who have an
understanding of data.
Because data science is so new,
universities are scrambling to define it and develop
curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across
disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics,
computer science and math, coupled with the
specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns
in marine life to historical texts.
With the sheer volume, variety and speed
of data today, as well as developing technologies,
programs are more than a repackaging of existing
courses. “Data science is emerging as an academic
discipline, defined not by a mere amalgamation of
interdisciplinary fields but as a body of knowledge,
a set of professional practices, a professional
organization and a set of ethical responsibilities,”
said Christopher Starr, chairman of the computer
science department at the College of Charleston,
one of a few institutions offering data science at
the undergraduate level.
Most master’s degree programs in data
science require basic programming skills. They
start with what Ms. Schutt describes as the
“boring” part — scraping and cleaning raw data
and “getting it into a nice table where you can
actually analyze it.” Many use data sets provided
by businesses or government, and pass back their
results. Some host competitions to see which
student can come up with the best solution to a
company’s problem.
Studying a Web user’s data has privacy
implications. Using data to decide someone’s
eligibility for a line of credit or health insurance, or
even recommending who they friend on
Facebook, can affect their lives. “We’re building
these models that have impact on human life,” Ms.
Schutt said. “How can we do that carefully?” Ethics
classes address these questions.
Finally, students have to learn to
communicate their findings, visually and orally,
and they need business know-how, perhaps to
develop new products.
From: www.nytimes.com
In terms of verb tense, the sentences
“Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at
Johnson Research Labs, taught ‘Introduction to
Data Science’ last semester at Columbia.”, “In the
last few years, dozens of programs under a variety
of names have sprung up in response to the
excitement about Big Data.” and “Most master’s
degree programs in data science require basic
programming skills.” are, respectively, in the
Q240995
Inglês
In terms of tense, the sentences "Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape", "Some students had already gathered online." and "On a square coffee table sat a short stack of original issues of the magazine…" are respectively in the