Questões de Inglês - Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension para Concurso
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Valdivia Figurines and the appeal of 'the oldest'
(1º§) The logo for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture website is about my favourite thing of the afternoon which is saying a lot since I spent much of the day reading about giant Olmec heads. Three Valdivia Figurines in the colours of the Ecuadorian flag? I am sold! Golly, I love Valdivia figurines for all the right and all the wrong reasons.
(2º§) There are two things that can easily be said about Valdivia figurines: they are VERY Ecuadorian and they are VERY looted. The first explains why they appear prominently on the Ministry of Culture website (and on stencilled graffiti around Quito circa 2007). Ancient Ecuador has played second fiddle to Ancient Peru since the early days of archaeology. The Valdivia culture, however, represents something that Peru doesn't have, 'the oldest'. Everyone loves 'the oldest', national pride, etc. etc.
(3º§) Who else loves 'the oldest'? Collectors and Museums. If the Valdivia pottery sequence is the oldest in the new world, collectors want a slice of that pie. Heck, even better than some junky pottery, the Valdivia made interesting figurines: lovely ladies that look good on stark black backgrounds in auction catalogues. They are part of 'the oldest' yet they also look good.
(4º§) Valdivia sites are famously looted and Valdivia figurines are famously faked. A few years back I started doing some initial work into looting in Ecuador (which led to fieldwork in Quito and the cloud forest that didn't really go anywhere as of yet) and I, like anyone else going down that road, came across Bruhns and Hammond's 1983 Journal of Field Archaeology piece 'A Visit to Valdivia'. Knowing nothing at all about Ecuador at the time, I had never heard of Valdivia, a wonder since the only Ecuadorian archaeology books that Cambridge owns are a few by the late Betty Meggars and Emilio Estrada from the 1950s and 1960s which link uber-ancient Ecuador to Jomon Period Japan (yeah...I know). As Bruhns and Hammond relate, Meggars detected faking at Valdivia immediately after the start of her excavations: practical jokers who discovered a market for their copies. As the market for the pieces grew, the presumed fakes get more and more elaborate and fanciful...and Valdivia sites were just looted to pieces.
(5º§) So really with Valdivia we are left with a situation where we don't know what is real. It is directly comparable to the Cycladic Figurine problem: the corpus is mostly looted, it contains tons of forms not found in the limited archaeological excavations that have been conducted, and we intellectual consumers of artefacts don't know what to believe. To me Valdivia figurines are the perfect looting Catch 22: they warrant study so that the interested public can learn about 'the oldest', but they can't be studied because collectors wanted 'the oldest' so sites were looted and buckets of fakes were produced.
(6º§) In 2007 I bought a fake Valdivia figurine in Otavalo which now stands in a Spondylus shell on my counter and watches me cook. The fella selling it to me told me it was real. I knew it wasn't but made to put it back saying something along the lines that law breaking makes me sick. He quickly agreed that it wasn't real and cut his asking price by a ton. Que Sera. Three cheers, Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture, your logo is the best.
https://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2012/09/valdivia-figurines-a
nd-appeal-of-oldest.html
According to the passage, why are Valdivia figurines prominently featured on the Ministry of Culture website?
FlexSea’s biodegradable plastics attract £3m investment
01 FlexSea, a startup with its roots at Imperial College London, has announced the completion
02 of a seed round worth £3 million in equity and grants. The investment will help the company
03 commercialize a range of sustainable packaging solutions it has developed, based on plastics
04 derived from seaweed. The aim is to address the catastrophic impact of conventional plastics
05 on the environment, in particular the single-use plastic products that persist in the ocean for
06 many hundreds of years after they are discarded. In contrast, the biodegradable plastics
07 devised by FlexSea will break down in the sea or the soil within a matter of weeks.
08 Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea, first started to think about
09 biodegradable plastics during the COVID pandemic. “I noticed the amount of plastic packaging
10 that was piling up at home, because of the online groceries and other deliveries we relied on
11 at the time, and I just had enough,” he says. He started looking into the biodegradable plastics
12 that were already available, and found that they often had shortcomings. Some didn’t actually
13 break down very rapidly under day-to-day environmental conditions, while others involved
14 unsustainable production methods. For example, plastics derived from seaweed are often made
15 from brown seaweed, which is usually harvested from nature, rather than the commonly
16 cultivated red seaweed. He set out to develop a thin-film plastic from red seaweed. “By the
17 end of lockdown I had the first prototype, a transparent flexi-film, and that is still the backbone
18 technology of our solvent-cast thin films,” he says.
19 FlexSea was set up in 2021 with co-founder Thibaut Monfort-Micheo. Their first home was
20 at Scale Space, on the White City Campus, and they received support from across Imperial's
21 enterprising ecosystem. In 2021 they joined the Centre for Climate Change Innovation’s
22 Greenhouse Accelerator, and in 2022 they took part in Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge,
23 winning the energy and environment track. "FlexSea has the potential to change the pattern
24 of human consumption of plastic and therefore change the sustainability path of our planet,”
25 says Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of lead investor Indico Capital. "This
26 investment will allow us ___ (make) significant progress and penetrate the market effectively,”
27 says Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea.
(Available at: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248154/flexseas-biodegradable-plastics-attract-3m-investment/ – text especially adapted for this test).
In the excerpt “By the end of lockdown I had the first prototype” (l. 16-17), the underlined structure suggests that the prototype was developed:
FlexSea’s biodegradable plastics attract £3m investment
01 FlexSea, a startup with its roots at Imperial College London, has announced the completion
02 of a seed round worth £3 million in equity and grants. The investment will help the company
03 commercialize a range of sustainable packaging solutions it has developed, based on plastics
04 derived from seaweed. The aim is to address the catastrophic impact of conventional plastics
05 on the environment, in particular the single-use plastic products that persist in the ocean for
06 many hundreds of years after they are discarded. In contrast, the biodegradable plastics
07 devised by FlexSea will break down in the sea or the soil within a matter of weeks.
08 Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea, first started to think about
09 biodegradable plastics during the COVID pandemic. “I noticed the amount of plastic packaging
10 that was piling up at home, because of the online groceries and other deliveries we relied on
11 at the time, and I just had enough,” he says. He started looking into the biodegradable plastics
12 that were already available, and found that they often had shortcomings. Some didn’t actually
13 break down very rapidly under day-to-day environmental conditions, while others involved
14 unsustainable production methods. For example, plastics derived from seaweed are often made
15 from brown seaweed, which is usually harvested from nature, rather than the commonly
16 cultivated red seaweed. He set out to develop a thin-film plastic from red seaweed. “By the
17 end of lockdown I had the first prototype, a transparent flexi-film, and that is still the backbone
18 technology of our solvent-cast thin films,” he says.
19 FlexSea was set up in 2021 with co-founder Thibaut Monfort-Micheo. Their first home was
20 at Scale Space, on the White City Campus, and they received support from across Imperial's
21 enterprising ecosystem. In 2021 they joined the Centre for Climate Change Innovation’s
22 Greenhouse Accelerator, and in 2022 they took part in Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge,
23 winning the energy and environment track. "FlexSea has the potential to change the pattern
24 of human consumption of plastic and therefore change the sustainability path of our planet,”
25 says Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of lead investor Indico Capital. "This
26 investment will allow us ___ (make) significant progress and penetrate the market effectively,”
27 says Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea.
(Available at: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248154/flexseas-biodegradable-plastics-attract-3m-investment/ – text especially adapted for this test).
Which alternative best describes FlexSea’s main objective in producing biodegradable plastic?
FlexSea’s biodegradable plastics attract £3m investment
01 FlexSea, a startup with its roots at Imperial College London, has announced the completion
02 of a seed round worth £3 million in equity and grants. The investment will help the company
03 commercialize a range of sustainable packaging solutions it has developed, based on plastics
04 derived from seaweed. The aim is to address the catastrophic impact of conventional plastics
05 on the environment, in particular the single-use plastic products that persist in the ocean for
06 many hundreds of years after they are discarded. In contrast, the biodegradable plastics
07 devised by FlexSea will break down in the sea or the soil within a matter of weeks.
08 Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea, first started to think about
09 biodegradable plastics during the COVID pandemic. “I noticed the amount of plastic packaging
10 that was piling up at home, because of the online groceries and other deliveries we relied on
11 at the time, and I just had enough,” he says. He started looking into the biodegradable plastics
12 that were already available, and found that they often had shortcomings. Some didn’t actually
13 break down very rapidly under day-to-day environmental conditions, while others involved
14 unsustainable production methods. For example, plastics derived from seaweed are often made
15 from brown seaweed, which is usually harvested from nature, rather than the commonly
16 cultivated red seaweed. He set out to develop a thin-film plastic from red seaweed. “By the
17 end of lockdown I had the first prototype, a transparent flexi-film, and that is still the backbone
18 technology of our solvent-cast thin films,” he says.
19 FlexSea was set up in 2021 with co-founder Thibaut Monfort-Micheo. Their first home was
20 at Scale Space, on the White City Campus, and they received support from across Imperial's
21 enterprising ecosystem. In 2021 they joined the Centre for Climate Change Innovation’s
22 Greenhouse Accelerator, and in 2022 they took part in Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge,
23 winning the energy and environment track. "FlexSea has the potential to change the pattern
24 of human consumption of plastic and therefore change the sustainability path of our planet,”
25 says Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of lead investor Indico Capital. "This
26 investment will allow us ___ (make) significant progress and penetrate the market effectively,”
27 says Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea.
(Available at: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248154/flexseas-biodegradable-plastics-attract-3m-investment/ – text especially adapted for this test).
Order the events below chronologically according to the text, 1 being the first thing that happened, and 5 being the last.
( ) FlexSea received a great sum of money to intensify commercial actions.
( ) Fideli searched existing biodegradable plastic solutions.
( ) FlexSea took part in an important event promoted by Imperial College London.
( ) Fideli worried about the amount of disposable plastic people throw away every day.
( ) Fideli built a prototype with red seaweed.
The correct order of filling the parentheses, from top to bottom, is: