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Q1803051 Inglês

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans


    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.


    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.


    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.


    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.


    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.


    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.


    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.


    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.


    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.


    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.


    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.


    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.


    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades. 


    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

The verb tenses in "...our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and prosperous future..." are, respectively,
Alternativas
Q1803050 Inglês

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans


    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.


    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.


    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.


    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.


    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.


    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.


    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.


    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.


    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.


    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.


    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.


    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.


    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades. 


    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

In the sentence “The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history.” the verb tenses are, respectively,
Alternativas
Q2030420 Inglês
Americans May Add Five Times More Plastic to the Oceans Than Thought

The United States is using more
plastic than ever, and waste exported for
recycling is often mishandled, according
to a new study.
The United States contribution
to coastal plastic pollution worldwide is
significantly larger than previously
thought, possibly by as much as five
times, according to a study published
Friday. The research, published in Science
Advances, is the sequel to a 2015 paper
by the same authors. Two factors
contributed to the sharp increase:
Americans are using more plastic than
ever and the current study included
pollution generated by United States
exports of plastic waste, while the earlier
one did not.
The United States, which does
not have sufficient infrastructure to
handle its recycling demands at home,
exports about half of its recyclable waste.
Of the total exported, about 88 percent
ends up in countries considered to have
inadequate waste management.
“When you consider how much
of our plastic waste isn’t actually
recyclable because it is low-value,
contaminated or difficult to process, it’s
not surprising that a lot of it ends up
polluting the environment,” said the
study’s lead author, Kara Lavender Law,
research professor of oceanography at
Sea Education Association, in a
statement.
The study estimates that in
2016, the United States contributed
between 1.1 and 2.2 million metric tons of
plastic waste to the oceans through a
combination of littering, dumping and 
mismanaged exports. At a minimum,
that’s almost double the total estimated
waste in the team’s previous study. At the
high end, it would be a fivefold increase
over the earlier estimate.
Nicholas Mallos, a senior
director at the Ocean Conservancy and an
author of the study, said the upper
estimate would be equal to a pile of
plastic covering the area of the White
House Lawn and reaching as high as the
Empire State Building.
The ranges are wide partly
because “there’s no real standard for
being able to provide good quality data on
collection and disposal of waste in
general,” said Ted Siegler, a resource
economist at DSM Environmental
Solutions, a consulting firm, and an
author of the study. Mr. Siegler said the
researchers had evaluated waste-disposal
practices in countries around the world
and used their “best professional
judgment” to determine the lowest and
highest amounts of plastic waste likely to
escape into the environment. They settled
on a range of 25 percent to 75 percent.
Tony Walker, an associate
professor at the Dalhousie University
School for Resource and Environmental
Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said that
analyzing waste data can amount to a
“data minefield” because there are no
data standards across municipalities.
Moreover, once plastic waste is shipped
overseas, he said, data is often not
recorded at all.
Nonetheless, Dr. Walker, who
was not involved in the study, said it
could offer a more accurate accounting of
plastic pollution than the previous study,
which likely underestimated the United
States’ contribution. “They’ve put their
best estimate, as accurate as they can be
with this data,” he said, and used ranges,
which underscores that the figures are
estimates.
Of the plastics that go into the
United States recycling system, about 9
percent of the country’s total plastic
waste, there is no guarantee that they’ll
be remade into new consumer goods. New
plastic is so inexpensive to manufacture
that only certain expensive, high-grade
plastics are profitable to recycle within the
United States, which is why roughly half
of the country’s plastic waste was shipped
abroad in 2016, the most recent year for
which data is available.
Since 2016, however, the
recycling landscape has changed. China
and many countries in Southeast Asia
have stopped accepting plastic waste
imports. And lower oil prices have further
reduced the market for recycled plastic.
“What the new study really underscores is
we have to get a handle on source
reduction at home,” Mr. Mallos said. “That
starts with eliminating unnecessary and
problematic single-use plastics.”

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/
In the phrases “Of the total exported” (line 23) and “in countries considered” (line 24), the two verbs are in the
Alternativas
Q2030415 Inglês
Americans May Add Five Times More Plastic to the Oceans Than Thought

The United States is using more
plastic than ever, and waste exported for
recycling is often mishandled, according
to a new study.
The United States contribution
to coastal plastic pollution worldwide is
significantly larger than previously
thought, possibly by as much as five
times, according to a study published
Friday. The research, published in Science
Advances, is the sequel to a 2015 paper
by the same authors. Two factors
contributed to the sharp increase:
Americans are using more plastic than
ever and the current study included
pollution generated by United States
exports of plastic waste, while the earlier
one did not.
The United States, which does
not have sufficient infrastructure to
handle its recycling demands at home,
exports about half of its recyclable waste.
Of the total exported, about 88 percent
ends up in countries considered to have
inadequate waste management.
“When you consider how much
of our plastic waste isn’t actually
recyclable because it is low-value,
contaminated or difficult to process, it’s
not surprising that a lot of it ends up
polluting the environment,” said the
study’s lead author, Kara Lavender Law,
research professor of oceanography at
Sea Education Association, in a
statement.
The study estimates that in
2016, the United States contributed
between 1.1 and 2.2 million metric tons of
plastic waste to the oceans through a
combination of littering, dumping and 
mismanaged exports. At a minimum,
that’s almost double the total estimated
waste in the team’s previous study. At the
high end, it would be a fivefold increase
over the earlier estimate.
Nicholas Mallos, a senior
director at the Ocean Conservancy and an
author of the study, said the upper
estimate would be equal to a pile of
plastic covering the area of the White
House Lawn and reaching as high as the
Empire State Building.
The ranges are wide partly
because “there’s no real standard for
being able to provide good quality data on
collection and disposal of waste in
general,” said Ted Siegler, a resource
economist at DSM Environmental
Solutions, a consulting firm, and an
author of the study. Mr. Siegler said the
researchers had evaluated waste-disposal
practices in countries around the world
and used their “best professional
judgment” to determine the lowest and
highest amounts of plastic waste likely to
escape into the environment. They settled
on a range of 25 percent to 75 percent.
Tony Walker, an associate
professor at the Dalhousie University
School for Resource and Environmental
Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said that
analyzing waste data can amount to a
“data minefield” because there are no
data standards across municipalities.
Moreover, once plastic waste is shipped
overseas, he said, data is often not
recorded at all.
Nonetheless, Dr. Walker, who
was not involved in the study, said it
could offer a more accurate accounting of
plastic pollution than the previous study,
which likely underestimated the United
States’ contribution. “They’ve put their
best estimate, as accurate as they can be
with this data,” he said, and used ranges,
which underscores that the figures are
estimates.
Of the plastics that go into the
United States recycling system, about 9
percent of the country’s total plastic
waste, there is no guarantee that they’ll
be remade into new consumer goods. New
plastic is so inexpensive to manufacture
that only certain expensive, high-grade
plastics are profitable to recycle within the
United States, which is why roughly half
of the country’s plastic waste was shipped
abroad in 2016, the most recent year for
which data is available.
Since 2016, however, the
recycling landscape has changed. China
and many countries in Southeast Asia
have stopped accepting plastic waste
imports. And lower oil prices have further
reduced the market for recycled plastic.
“What the new study really underscores is
we have to get a handle on source
reduction at home,” Mr. Mallos said. “That
starts with eliminating unnecessary and
problematic single-use plastics.”

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/
In the sentence “Moreover, once plastic waste is shipped overseas, he said, data is often not recorded at all” (lines 75-77), the underlined verbs are, respectively,
Alternativas
Ano: 2018 Banca: INEP Órgão: UFMS Prova: INEP - 2018 - UFMS - Processo Seletivo - Vestibular UFMS |
Q1803274 Inglês

Read Text to answer question.


The article analyzes the relationship of Indigenous Peoples with the public policy of Social Assistance (AS) in Brazil. Based on data collected during field work carried out in 2014, will analyze the case of the Indigenous Reserve of Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul. In the first part, I characterize the unequal relationship between society and national state with Indigenous Peoples to, then approach the Welfare State politics as an opportunity to face the violation of rights resulting from the colonial siege. Then we will see if Dourados to illustrate the dilemmas and possibilities of autonomy and indigenous role faced with this public policy. It is expected to contribute to the discussion of statehood pointing concrete cases where the local implementation of AS policy is permeable to a greater or lesser extent, the demands of Indigenous Peoples by adaptation to their social organizations and worldviews.


(BORGES, Júlio César. Brazilian society has made us poor: Social Assistance and ethnic autonomy of Indiggenous Peoples. The case of Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul. Horiz. antropol. Disponível em: <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S0104-71832016000200303&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en>. Acesso em: 10 nov. 2018).

Read Text II to answer question.    
    Cleir Avila Ferreira Júnior was born in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul State, Brazil. He is a self-taught artist. He has painted professionally since he was 18 years old. He has begun his artistic works with a hyperrealist influence, where he portrayed some regional and ecological themes, especially the Pantanal nature, presented in almost all his art.
    In 1994, he started his mural work on the sides of some Campo Grande’s buildings, as example: the great "Onça Pintada" (50m high and 220m2) took him and his team a month of execution, and the "Tuiuiús" (40m high and 300m2) was his second mural.     In 1995, he painted the "Blue Macaw" (45m high and 430m2).     In 1996, he built the "Macaws’ Monument" in front of the international airport in Campo Grande, MS.     In 1998, he painted a mural of 700m2 in Corumbá, MS, where he portrayed the red macaw in one of its walls and in the other two a big gold fish. Therefore, he did uncountable art around Mato Grosso do Sul State, mainly into the touristic cities.
(FERREIRA JÚNIOR, Cleir Avila. Disponível em: <http://www.artenossaterra.xpg.com.br/index.html>. Acesso em: 10 nov. 2018).

Based on part of the Text II, answer the question: In which verb tense are the following sentences?
“In 1995, he painted the ‘Blue Macaw’ (45m high and 430m2 ). In 1996, he built the ‘Macaws Monument’ in front of the international airport in Campo Grande, MS. In 1998, he painted a mural of 700m2 in Corumbá, MS, where he portrayed the red macaw in one of its walls and in the other two a big gold fish. Therefore, he did uncountable art around Mato Grosso do Sul State, mainly into the touristic cities”.  
Alternativas
Ano: 2017 Banca: UEG Órgão: UEG Prova: UEG - 2017 - UEG - Processo Seletivo UEG 2017/2 |
Q1793716 Inglês
Leia com atenção o texto a seguir para responder à questão.

'Post-truth' named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries

In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year.

Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”. 

Contenders for the title had included the noun “alt-right”, shortened from the fuller form “alternative right” and defined as “an ideological grouping associated with extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints, characterised by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content”. First used in 2008, its use “surged” this spring and summer, said the dictionary, with 30% of usage in August alone.

But the increase in usage of post-truth saw the term eventually emerge ahead of the pack. “We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and Donald Trump securing the Republican presidential nomination. Given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time,” predicted Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl.

“It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse. Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.” 

Disponível em:<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries>.Acesso em: 21 fev. 2017. (Adaptado).
Considerando-se a estrutura linguística do texto, verifica-se que
Alternativas
Ano: 2015 Banca: UERR Órgão: UERR Prova: UERR - 2015 - UERR - Vestibular |
Q1340100 Inglês

Text 3

Al Capone

    Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, to poor immigrant parents, Al Capone went on to become the most infamous gangster in American history. In 1920 during the height of Prohibition, Capone’s multi-million dollar Chicago operation in bootlegging, prostitution and gambling dominated the organized crime scene. Capone was responsible for many brutal acts of violence, mainly against other gangsters. The most famous of these was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, in which he ordered the assassination of seven rivals. Capone was never indicted for his racketeering but was finally brought to justice for income-tax evasion in 1931. After serving six-and-a-half years, Capone was released. He died in 1947 in Miami. Capone’s life captured the public imagination, and his gangster persona has been immortalized in the many movies and books inspired by his exploits.

(Excerpt from the site: http://www.history.com/topics/alcapone. Researched on: October 2015)

In the sentence “Capone was responsible for many brutal acts of violence, mainly against other gangsters”. The verb “was” is the Simple Past of:
Alternativas
Ano: 2015 Banca: PUC - GO Órgão: PUC-GO Prova: PUC - GO - 2015 - PUC-GO - Vestibular - 2º Semestre |
Q584577 Inglês

TEXTO 8

CAPÍTULO IV

      Este Quincas Borba, se acaso me fizeste o favor de ler as Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, é aquele mesmo náufrago da existência, que ali aparece, mendigo, herdeiro inopinado, e inventor de uma filosofia. Aqui o tens agora em Barbacena. Logo que chegou, enamorou-se de uma viúva, senhora de condição mediana e parcos meios de vida; mas, tão acanhada, que os suspiros no namorado ficavam sem eco. Chamava-se Maria da Piedade. Um irmão dela, que é o presente Rubião, fez todo o possível para casá-los. Piedade resistiu, um pleuris a levou.

     Foi esse trechozinho de romance que ligou os dois homens. Saberia Rubião que o nosso Quincas Borba trazia aquele grãozinho de sandice, que um médico supôs achar-lhe? Seguramente, não; tinha-o por homem esquisito. É, todavia, certo que o grãozinho não se despegou do cérebro de Quincas Borba, — nem antes, nem depois da moléstia que lentamente o comeu. Quincas Borba tivera ali alguns parentes, mortos já agora em 1867; o último foi o tio que o deixou por herdeiro de seus bens. Rubião ficou sendo o único amigo do filósofo. Regia então uma escola de meninos, que fechou para tratar do enfermo. Antes de professor, metera ombros a algumas empresas, que foram a pique. 

      Durou o cargo de enfermeiro mais de cinco meses, perto de seis. Era real o desvelo de Rubião, paciente, risonho, múltiplo, ouvindo as ordens do médico, dando os remédios às horas marcadas, saindo a passeio com o doente, sem esquecer nada, nem o serviço da casa, nem a leitura dos jornais, logo que chegava a mala da Corte ou a de Ouro Preto.

      — Tu és bom, Rubião, suspirava Quincas Borba.

      — Grande façanha! Como se você fosse mau!

      A opinião ostensiva do médico era que a doença do Quincas Borba iria saindo devagar. Um dia, o nosso Rubião, acompanhando o médico até à porta da rua, perguntou-lhe qual era o verdadeiro estado do amigo. Ouviu que estava perdido, completamente perdido; mas, que o fosse animando. Para que tornar-lhe a morte mais aflitiva pela certeza...?

      — Lá isso, não, atalhou Rubião; para ele, morrer é negócio fácil. Nunca leu um livro que ele escreveu, há anos, não sei que negócio de filosofia...

      — Não; mas filosofia é uma coisa, e morrer de verdade é outra; adeus.

                                                   (ASSIS, Machado de. Quincas Borba. São Paulo: Ática, 2011. p. 23-24.) 

In Text 8, most of the verbs in Portuguese are conjugated in the past tense, such as “chegou”, “enamorou-se” e “resistiu”. Complete the following text using the correct past tense conjugation of the verbs in parenthesis in English:

Last night Susan (go) ____________ to her friend’s birthday party. She (dance) ____________ with her boyfriend, and (eat) ____________ cake. After they (leave) ____________ the party, Susan and her boyfriend (decide) ____________ to go and watch a movie at the theater. They (see) ____________ the new Transformer’s movie, and then they went home. When she (get) ____________ home, Susan (take) ____________ a shower and (fall) ____________ asleep quickly.

Choose the correct option from the ones listed below:

Alternativas
Ano: 2014 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2014 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1285440 Inglês
     Brazil plowed billions of dollars into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the longdelayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new public buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were abandoned right after being constructed. There was even an illfated U.F.O. museum built with federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit like a lost ship among the weeds.
     As Brazil sprints to get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run up against a catalog of delays, some caused by deadly construction accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It is building bus and rail systems for spectators that will not be finished until long after the games are done. But the World Cup projects are just a part of a bigger national problem casting a pall over Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish projects conceived when economic growth was surging that now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget. 
    Some economists say the troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy, irresponsible allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.
    Huge street protests have been aimed at costly new stadiums being built in cities like Manaus and Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats after the World Cup events are finished, adding to concerns that even more white elephants will emerge from the tournament. 
   “The fiascos are multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas, a Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re waking up to the reality that immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our streets.” 
     The growing list of troubled development projects includes a $3.4 billion network of concrete canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of northeast Brazil — which was supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well as dozens of new wind farms idled by a lack of transmission lines and unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de Janeiro’s skyline.
     Economists surveyed by the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy growing just 1.63 percent this year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010, making 2014 the fourth straight year of slow growth. 
     President Dilma Rousseff’s supporters contend that the public spending has worked, helping to keep unemployment at historical lows and preventing what would have been a much worse economic slowdown had the government not pumped its considerable resources into infrastructure development.
    Still, a growing chorus of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure projects reveals weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism. First, they say, Brazil gives extraordinary influence to a web of state-controlled companies, banks and pension funds to invest in ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the vast public bureaucracy cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.
     “Some ventures never deserved public money in the first place,” said Sérgio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, pointing to the millions in state financing for the overhaul of the Glória hotel in Rio, owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike Batista. The project was left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup, when Mr. Batista’s business empire crumbled last year. “For infrastructure projects which deserve state support and get it,” Mr. Lazzarini continued, “there’s the daunting task of dealing with the risks that the state itself creates.” 
     The Transnordestina, a railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast Brazil, illustrates some of the pitfalls plaguing projects big and small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a cost of about $1.8 billion, the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000 miles, is now expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from state banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016. But with work sites abandoned because of audits and other setbacks months ago in and around Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s poorest states, even that timeline seems optimistic. Long stretches where freight trains were already supposed to be running stand deserted. Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the shadow of ghostly railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys. “Thieves are pillaging metal from the work sites,” said Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician who labored with thousands of others before work halted last year. “Now there are just these bridges left in the middle of nowhere.” 
     Brazil’s transportation minister, César Borges, expressed exasperation with the delays in finishing the railroad, which is needed to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the bureaucracies that delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court of Accounts; the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped slaves; and the Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors. Still, Mr. Borges insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just Brazil.”
    Some economists contend that the way Brazil is investing may be hampering growth instead of supporting it. The authorities encouraged energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot operate because they lack transmission lines to connect to the electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers worry over potential electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams run dry amid a drought.
     Then there is the extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in southeast Brazil where residents claimed to have seen an alien in 1996. Officials secured federal money to build the museum, but now all that remains of the unfinished project is the rusting carcass of what looks like a flying saucer. “That museum,” said Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of São Paulo, “is an insult to both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial beings like ourselves who foot the bill for yet another project failing to deliver.”

Adapted from www.nytimes.com/April 12, 2014.
In terms of tenses, the verbs in “…investors have grown…”, “…he acknowledged…” and “were intended” are, respectively, in the
Alternativas
Ano: 2014 Banca: UniCEUB Órgão: UniCEUB Prova: UniCEUB - 2014 - UniCEUB - Vestibular - 1º Vestibular |
Q515706 Inglês
A rise in temperature in the semi-arid region of Brazil has left rivers dry and cattle dying of thirst. The search is on for initiatives to combat desertification.

                                                                                                                                          Guardian Professional

The underlined words in the passage represent the
Alternativas
Ano: 2014 Banca: UniCEUB Órgão: UniCEUB Prova: UniCEUB - 2014 - UniCEUB - Vestibular - 1º Vestibular |
Q515705 Inglês
President Obama has outlined a slimmer version of the NSA program that ................... data from millions of Americans’ phone calls in a proposal that ................... phone companies to hold the records, but mandates law enforcement to win a secretive court’s approval to search them.

                                                                                                                                                                              TIME
Alternativas
Ano: 2014 Banca: UniCEUB Órgão: UniCEUB Prova: UniCEUB - 2014 - UniCEUB - Vestibular - 1º Vestibular |
Q515702 Inglês
On the hunt for a good read? Try a new romance

Dark Deeds by Anne Marie Becker. Book 4, Mindhunters. Walking away from sexy Detective Diego Sandoval ................... one of ................... things security specialist Becca Haney ever had to do, but when he’s assigned to help keep her safe from a human trafficking ring and an admirer ................... only as “the Fan,”, he’s determined to stay by her side and learn about the woman behind the passion – scars and all.

                                                                                                                                    USA TODAY
Alternativas
Ano: 2013 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279897 Inglês
TEXT

     BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations.
     In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug. 
      In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
     “I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.” 
     His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination. 
   The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education. 
     In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway as chief justice and president of the panel overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize same-sex marriage across the country. And in an anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast vote-buying scheme.
   Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less pushing the institution to assert its independence, long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked as a bricklayer.  
    But his prominence — not just on the court, but in the streets as well — is so well established that masks with his face were sold for Carnival, amateur musicians have composed songs about his handling of the corruption trial and posted them on YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top choices for president in next year’s elections.
     While the protests have subsided since their height in June, the political tumult they set off persists. The race for president, once considered a shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so much in the public eye that gossip columnists are following his romance with a woman in her 20s — repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a candidate for anything,” he says. 
     But the same public glare that has turned him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While he has won widespread admiration for his guidance of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every other prominent political figure in Brazil, has recently come under scrutiny. And for someone accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on the defensive. 
     One report in the Brazilian news media described how he received about $180,000 in payments for untaken leaves of absence during his 19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an apartment in Miami through a limited liability company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends that he has done nothing wrong. 
     In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance. 
     As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea. 
     Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris. 
   Fascinated by the legal systems of other countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative action in the United States. He still voices his admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice in the United States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high court toward socially liberal rulings.
    Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling of the trial of political operatives, legislators and bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly allowance, after the regular payments made to lawmakers in exchange for their votes. 
    Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the high court sentenced some of the most powerful figures in the governing Workers Party to years in prison for their crimes in the scheme, including bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political system in which impunity for politicians has been the norm.  
     Now the mensalão trial is entering what could be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times been visibly exasperated that defendants who have already been found guilty and sentenced have managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed with other justices over their consideration of a rare legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at the high court are examined. 
     Losing his patience with one prominent justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by using legalese to prop up certain positions. An outcry ensued among some who could not stomach Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that. “Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?” asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was qualified to preside over the court. “What powers does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal Tribunal?” 
      Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the interview, he said some tension was necessary for the court to function properly. “It was always like this,” he said, contending that arguments are now just easier to see because the court’s proceedings are televised. 
     Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed with the violence of some demonstrators, but he also said he believed that the street movements were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.” 
     “People don’t want to passively stand by and observe these arrangements of the elite, which were always the Brazilian tradition,” he said. 
In the sentences “Mr. Barbosa took on the entire legal system,” “he is overseeing the precedent-setting trial,” and “Mr. Barbosa has at times been exasperated,” the verbs are, respectively, in the
Alternativas
Ano: 2013 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Inglês - 1º Dia |
Q1261831 Inglês
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
Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2012 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 1º Dia - 2ª fase |
Q1278818 Inglês
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
Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2012 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 1º Dia - 2ª fase |
Q1278816 Inglês
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. 
The verbs of the sentences “In the first task, the children sorted the shapes by color.”, “…since studies have shown that bilinguals…” and “Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition?” are respectively in the
Alternativas
Ano: 2010 Banca: VUNESP Órgão: UNESP Prova: VUNESP - 2010 - UNESP - Vestibular - Primeiro Semestre |
Q577814 Inglês
Instrução: Leia o texto Status of same-sex marriage para responder a questão.

                                                 Status of same-sex marriage
South America

Argentina
The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (a federal district and capital city of the republic) allows same-sex civil unions.
The province of Rio Negro allows same-sex civil unions, too.
Legislation to enact same-sex marriage across all of Argentina was approved on July 15, 2010.

Brazil
A law that would allow same-sex civil unions throughout the nation has been debated. Until the end of the first semester of 2010 the Supremo Tribunal Federal had not decided about it.

Colombia
The Colombian Constitutional Court ruled in February 2007 that same-sex couples are entitled to the same inheritance rights as heterosexuals in common-law marriages. This ruling made Colombia the first South American nation to legally recognize gay couples. Furthermore, in January 2009, the Court ruled that same-sex couples must be extended all of the rights offered to cohabitating heterosexual couples.

Ecuador
The Ecuadorian new constitution has made Ecuador stand out in the region. Ecuador has become the first country in South America where same sex civil union couples are legally recognized as a family and share the same rights of married
heterosexual couples.

Uruguay
Uruguay became the first country in South America to allow civil unions (for both opposite-sex and same-sexcouples) in a national platform on January 1, 2008. Children can be adopted by same-sex couples since 2009.

                                                                                                                                    (http://en.wikipedia.org/. Adaptado.)
Assinale a alternativa na qual todas as palavras são formas verbais relativas ao passado.
Alternativas
Respostas
1: B
2: B
3: A
4: A
5: C
6: B
7: D
8: B
9: D
10: B
11: E
12: A
13: C
14: C
15: A
16: A
17: C