Questões de Vestibular Comentadas por alunos sobre tradução | translation em inglês

                            “One never builds something finished”:

                   the brilliance of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Oliver Wainwright

February 4, 2017

   “All space is public,” says Paulo Mendes da Rocha. “The only private space that you can imagine is in the human mind.” It is an optimistic statement from the 88-year-old Brazilian architect, given he is a resident of São Paulo, a city where the triumph of the private realm over the public could not be more stark. The sprawling megalopolis is a place of such marked inequality that its superrich hop between their rooftop helipads because they are too scared of street crime to come down from the clouds.

   But for Mendes da Rocha, who received the 2017 gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects this week – an accolade previously bestowed on such luminaries as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright – the ground is everything. He has spent his 60-year career lifting his massive concrete buildings up, in gravity-defying balancing acts, or else burying them below ground in an attempt to liberate the Earth’s surface as a continuous democratic public realm. “The city has to be for everybody,” he says, “not just for the very few.”

                                                                                    (www.theguardian.com. Adaptado.)

Question: Is there anything I can do to train my body to need less sleep?

Karen Weintraub

June 17, 2016

   Many people think they can teach themselves to need less sleep, but they’re wrong, said Dr. Sigrid Veasey, a professor at the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. We might feel that we’re getting by fine on less sleep, but we’re deluding ourselves, Dr. Veasey said, largely because lack of sleep skews our self-awareness. “The more you deprive yourself of sleep over long periods of time, the less accurate you are of judging your own sleep perception,” she said.

   Multiple studies have shown that people don’t functionally adapt to less sleep than their bodies need. There is a range of normal sleep times, with most healthy adults naturally needing seven to nine hours of sleep per night, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Those over 65 need about seven to eight hours, on average, while teenagers need eight to 10 hours, and school-age children nine to 11 hours. People’s performance continues to be poor while they are sleep deprived, Dr. Veasey said.

   Health issues like pain, sleep apnea or autoimmune disease can increase people’s need for sleep, said Andrea Meredith, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. A misalignment of the clock that governs our sleep-wake cycle can also drive up the need for sleep, Dr. Meredith said. The brain’s clock can get misaligned by being stimulated at the wrong time of day, she said, such as from caffeine in the afternoon or evening, digital screen use too close to bedtime, or even exercise at a time of day when the body wants to be winding down.

(http://well.blogs.nytimes.com. Adaptado.)

Instrução: Leia o texto Is there life on other planets? para responder a  questão.

                                              Is there life on other planets?

                                                                                                              Hans Bodlaender

      There are many science fiction movies, television series and books about creatures from other planets. In most of these books and movies, aliens have spaceships that allow them to travel between different star systems, and on planets in these other systems, intelligent creatures live and look like people, but are different. We all know that reality is different from books. Physics tells us that strange things happen when we travel with a speed somewhat close to the speed of light – and, if modern physics is correct, it is impossible for humans to travel between star systems. If other creatures live on other planets, then they have to face the same type of problems, so it seems impossible for them to travel from their planets to ours. If there are intelligent creatures living on planets in other star systems, it seems, according to modern science, that we won’t meet them.

      If there is life on other planets, how did it originate? I see three hypotheses:

1. On the other planet, life started in the same way as the evolution theory says that it started here. Apart from the fact that the evolution theory is not the well-rounded and totally scientifically proven theory that people want us to believe, in general, followers of the theory tell that the chance of life starting on a planet is rather small. A term sometimes used is: A magnificent accident. I believe the probability is even smaller than they say, too small to assume that it actually can have happened by accident, but even if you believe life on earth was such a magnificent accident, the chances that this has happened more than once are too small to assume that it may have happened.

2. Life on different planets has a common origin. Say, some very primitive form of life originated somewhere travels to another planet, developing there into an intelligent form of life. There are quite a lot of questions to be asked of such a theory, and, again, calculating the probabilities seems to make it unlikely.

3. Life on earth has been created by God. Possibly, God has also created life on other planets. If God has created life on earth, he may have created life on other planets too. As far as I can tell, the Bible does not say anything about this, so this remains possible. If there are intelligent beings on other planets, I would assume they would know God. Would they also have a fall to sin, like the humans? Would we meet them in heaven? Would there be atheists and religious extraterrestrials? We cannot know.

      So, if there are extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, or, even, other types of life on planets outside our solar system, then to me, that would be a new proof of the existence of God. But I cannot understand atheists that sincerely state they follow standard evolution theory and are at the same moment on a search for intelligent life on other planets.

      Finally, is there life on other planets in our solar system? Well, I guess, yes: probably on Mars, there now will be bacteria brought to the planet from earth by one of the Mars-expeditions that were recently carried out.

                                                                (http://people.cs.uu.nl/hansb/religion. Adaptado.)