Questões da Prova Marinha - 2014 - ESCOLA NAVAL - Aspirante - 2° Dia

                            How New Words Are Created

      Below we can find the description of five different processes that have led to the creation of new words in the English language.

      (I) ________

      Many of the new words added to the ever-growing lexicon of the English language are just created out of the blue, and often have líttle or no etymological pedigree. A good example is the word dog, etymologically unrelated to any other known word, which, in the late Middle Ages, suddenly and mysteriously displaced the Old English word hound (or hund) which had served for centuries.

      (II) ___________

      Some words arise simply as shortened forms of longer words (exam, gym, lab, bus, vet, phone and burger are some obvious and wellused examples). Perhaps less obvious is the derivation of words like goodbye (a shortening of God-be-with-you) and hello (a shortened form of the Old English for "whole be thou").

      (III) ______________

      Like many languages, English allows the formation of words by joining together shorter words (e.g. airport, seashore, fireplace, etc.). The concatenation of words in English may even allow for different meanings depending on the order of combination (e.g. houseboat/boathouse, casebook/bookcase, etc) .

      (IV) _______

      The drift of word meanings over time often arises, often but not always due to catachresis. By some estimates, over half of all words adopted into English from Latin have changed their meaning in some way over time, often drastically. For example, smart originally meant sharp, cutting or painful; A more modern example is the changing meaning of gay from merry to homosexual (and, in some circles in more recent years, to stupid or bad).

      (V) ______

      New words may arise due to mishearings or misrenderings. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries (most of them thankfully quite obscure) that owe their existence purely to typos or other misrenderings (e.g. shamefaced from the original shamefast, penthouse from pentice, sweetheart from sweetard, buttonhole from button-hold, etc).

                         (Adapted from http://wviw.thehistoryofenglish.com/issues_new.html) 

     American Students Test Well in Problem Solving, but Trail Foreign Counterparts 

      Fifteen-year-olds in the United States scored above the average of those in the developed world on exams assessing problem-solving skills, but they trailed several countries in Asia and Europe as well as Canada, according to International standardized tests results released on Tuesday.

      The American students who took the problem-solving tests in 2012, the first time they were administered, did better on these exams than on reading, math and Science tests, suggesting that students in the United States are better able to apply knowledge to real-life situations than perform straightforward academic tasks.

      Still, students who took the problem-solving tests in countries including Singapore, South Korea, Japan, several provinces of China, Canada, Australia, Finland and Britain all outperformed American students. 

      "The good news is that problem solving still remains a relatively strong suit for American students," said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group focused on improving high schools. "The challenge is that a lot of other nations are now developing this and even moving ahead. So where we used to, in an earlier era, dominate in what we called the deeper learning skills — Creative thinking, criticai thinking and the ability to solve problems — in terms of producing the workers that are increasingly needed in this area, other nations are coming on strong and in some cases surpassing us ." 

      The new problem-solving exams were administered to a subset of 15-year-olds in 28 countries who sat for the Program for International Student Assessment, a set of tests every three years commonly known as PISA and given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group whose members include the world's wealthiest nations. Almost 1,275 American students took the exams. 

      Critics of the rankings on International tests have tended to characterize the high performance of Asian countries in particular as demonstrating the rote learning of facts and formulas. But the problem-solving results showed that students in the highest-performing nations were also able to think flexibly. Even on Interactive tasks, the American students' strength, all the Asian countries that participated in this round of exams outperformed the United States. 

      "To understand how to navigate a complex problem and exercise abstract reasoning is actually a very strong point for the Asian countries," said Francesco Avvisati, an analyst on the PISA team at the O.E.C.D.

                                                                     (Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com) 

                  How to Exercise While Sítting At Your Computer

      Is your work stressing you out? Is your work making you fat? Of course, it is. If you are in a relationship with your work like me (I hate the word "workaholic") , then maybe you are also dealing with some relationship issues like stress and weight gain. Every person who has a desk job does not need to indulge in a tub of ice-cream after a particularly stressful day at work to gain the pounds. In fact, the downside of being a way too dedicated employee is that it will make you fat! The stress to perform plus the inactivity of a desk job will definitely increase your waist size. What's more, you will become lethargic once four hours of inactivity can seriously send your metabolism leveis to an all-time low. If you think that a 30 minute walk every day is enough cardio activity in a week to maintain your metabolism, you are wrong! Yes, I was surprised too! The mathematics of this is that when you perform any cardio activity, it elevates your metabolism rate for a span of time, but not the entire day. Because the rest of the day you are sitting idle on your chair without much activity, the 30 minute walk is not enough, nor is the 1-hour intense workout. What you need to do to keep yourself from pilling on the pounds is to keep your metabolism rate high all day long. For that, you need to break the no physical activity routine from 9 to 5 by exercising while sitting at your desk!

      Here are simple exercises that take 5 minutes of your day and prevent you from feeling stiff.

    A) Neck: To stretch your neck, slowly flex your head forward and backward, side to side and look right and left. This can be done almost any time to lessen tension and strain. Never roll your head around your neck— this could cause damage to the joints of the neck.

    B) Shoulders: Roll your shoulders forward around 10 times, then backward. This helps release the tension off your shoulders.

    C) Wrists: Roll your wrists regularly, around every hour or so. Roll the wrists 10 times clockwise, then 10 times counterclockwise. This will help minimize the potential for getting carpal tunnel syndrome if you spend a lot of time typing.

    D) Ankles: Roll your ankles regularly. As with your wrists, roll the ankles in a clockwise motion three times, then counterclockwise. This helps improve blood circulation, and prevents that tingling feeling you can get when blood circulation is cut off, also known as "pins and needles".

                         (Adapted from http://www.buzzle.com and http://www.wikihow.com)