Questões de Concurso Sobre interpretação de texto | reading comprehension em inglês

Executive Secretary     We are looking for a competent Executive Secretary to support high-ranking officials in our company. You will be the one to organize and maintain the executive’s schedule and assist them by performing a variety of administrative tasks.    Executive secretaries must be quick professionals with great time-management and multitasking abilities. It is with their diligence and competence in their work that executives can focus on their managerial responsibilities without worrying for other tasks.    The goal is to contribute to the efficiency of the overall business by ensuring all assigned administrative duties are carried on timely and efficiently.    Responsibilities    - Maintain executive’s agenda and assist in planning appointments, board meetings, conferences, etc; 
- Attend meetings and keep minutes; 
- Receive and screen phone calls and redirect them when appropriate; 
- Handle and prioritize all outgoing or incoming correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.); 
- Make travel arrangements for executives;  Handle confidential documents ensuring they remain secure; 
- Prepare invoices or financial statements and provide assistance in bookkeeping; 
- Monitor office supplies and negotiate terms with suppliers to ensure the most cost-effective orders; 
- Maintain electronic and paper records ensuring information is organized and easily accessible; 
- Conduct research and prepare presentations or reports as assigned.    Requirements    - Proven experience as executive secretary or similar administrative role; 
- Proficient in MS Office and “back-office” software (e.g. ERP); 
- In depth knowledge of office management as well as technical vocabulary of relevant industry; 
- Familiarity with basic research methods and reporting techniques; 
- Excellent organizational and time-management skills; 
- Outstanding communication and negotiation abilities; 
- Integrity and confidentiality; 
- Degree in business administration or relative field.    (Adapted from: https://resources.workable.com/executivesecretary-job-description) 
From the text we can infer that:    I. The required professional will be responsible for    organizing the executive’s agenda. 
II. The person must have some knowledge on accountancy. 
III. The person must be graduated. 

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow:
Brazil's universities take affirmative action
By Julia Carneiro
BBC Brasil, Rio de Janeiro
28August 2013
Antonio Oliveira has benefited from the “quotas” in the first semester since the law came into effect. As a teenager he had to balance his time between school and helping his parents harvest vegetables to sell at a farmer's market, and doing other small jobs to scrape by.
Until recently, he says the only prospects for those growing up in his city, Colinas, were to work with crops or to get a post at the city hall - “a mediocre job that people think is heaven,” as he puts it. But Antonio has just finished his first term studying Economic Sciences at Rio de Janeiro's prestigious Federal University (UFRJ), a dream he had nurtured since his days at a rural public school.
His placement represents a radical change in the Brazilian university system.
Competition for places
Anew law approved a year ago reserves 50% of spots in Brazil's federal universities for students coming from public schools, low-income families and who are of African or indigenous descent. 
“I think this is a life-changing opportunity.I hope I will get a good job after university and be able to give my parents more comfort as they grow old,” said Antonio Oliveira, student.
The number of posts reserved for black, mixed race and indigenous students will vary according to the racial make-up of each Brazilian state.
Ten years ago affirmative action gradually started being adopted in both state and federally funded Brazilian universities, in an attempt to give underprivileged Brazilians better chances of getting free higher education - and thus access to better jobs. Half of Brazil's population is ofAfrican descent, but the country's public universities tend to reflect the Brazilian upper classes - who are mostly white.
Although these universities are free, those who traditionally made it in usually came from expensive private schools. Students from public education - the majority of whom are black or mixed race - were less likely to secure one of the highly competitive places. Now the “quotas” are mandatory in all of Brazil's 59 federal universities, which have until 2016 to reserve half of their positions for affirmative action.
Controversial issue
Antonio Freitas says the country is moving backwards with the quota policies.
But racial quotas have sparked widespread controversy in Brazil. Many who are against them argue that easing access to higher education denies the principle of merit that brings excellence to universities.
“This is bad for the future of Brazil, because the main objective of universities is research, is to achieve quality,” says Antonio Freitas, provost of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a prestigious private university.
“Eventually you may not have the most qualified people in engineering, in medical school, in the most challenging areas which Brazil needs to develop.” 
Adapted from: <http://www.bbc.com/news/business>
The sentences below provide further information about the studentAntonio Oliveira. Choose the only sentence in which the expression used to refer to his age is correct.

Teenage drinking and drug-taking
The Guardian newspaper in the UK invited people to send in their opinions about the phenomenon of young teenagers turning to drink and drugs. Below is a selection of  ome of those opinions: 
 I'm 27. Since the age of about 13 I've been drinking and smoking. Why? Let me attempt to answer. My generation's culture is accelerating at a pace never before experienced. We have instant solutions to everything. We want information - we log onto the net. We want to contact someone - we have our mobile phone. We want entertainment - we turn on the TV or the games console. With so many ways to instantly gratify ourselves is it any wonder than when things aren't going so well we turn to the quickest solution: drink and drugs? 
Andrea, Manchester
I am sickened by teenagers who blame society for their drinking habits. These kids say that society doesn't provide enough for them and that they are bored and that's why they turn to drink and drugs. Well, I grew up in a rural village that had absolutely nothing: no bars, cinemas, sports centres, youth clubs - NOTHING! But we didn't take drugs and I had my first drink when I was 17. Boredom is no excuse. 
G. Winterbottom, Greenwich
Let's remember how influential TV can be. Inevitably TV shows things that look good on the screen. This means they focus on people doing crazy things, being hip and generally acting like a true party animal. Filming university lecturers talking about good books is no way to attract a mass audience. Repeatedly kids are bombarded with images implying that life is about excitement and craziness - a message that entails a total disregard for the virtues that stop adult society falling apart. This must make young people nowadays much more demanding than kids in the past, and it must make them much more likely to look for easy ways of forgetting the thoroughly unexciting demands of adult life. 
Yazoo, Brazil
All 14-year-olds want to do is go out and do exactly what the 18 year olds are doing. I am constantly hearing tales from my friend's 14-year-old sister about how she's been sick in a club. She thinks it's great, and says it's what everybody does. She also tells me that the most popular radio station in the UK has a program on Saturday morning where teenagers regularly phone in and talk to the DJ about how drunk they got the previous night. Everybody just laughs. 
Andrew, Birmingham
If your future is going to consist of fifty or sixty years stuck in a tedious 9 to 5 job like a rat on a treadmill, chemicals are the way to go. 
Naz, UK
When I was young I turned to drink for the following reasons: I always felt like an outsider. Teachers and adults never valued my thoughts and contributions, I was a second class citizen because of my age. Yet when I went out at the weekend and drank I forgot all about that, and for a few hours I felt on top of the world. 
Alan, New Zealand
In Holland there isn't this idea that sex, drink and drugs (at least soft drugs) are something bad. The whole system is more relaxed and people are much more open about these issues. Of course there are problems but I don't think the solution is stricter legislation. Britain has much stricter legislation and the problems there are far worse. Take teenage pregnancies as an example. The age of consent for sex in the UK is 16, whereas in Holland it is 12, and we have the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe. 
Helga, Amsterdam
(http://fullspate.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk/archive/drugs2.html)
The text presents people’s opinions on the consumption of alcohol and drugs by young adolescents. Most of these people try to give a reason for the young adolescents’ drinking habits and drug use but

Explicitness, detachment, organization and density are aspects that should be taken into consideration when teaching… 

Following the term regarding language skills and five possible descriptions of the term. Choose the correct option A, B, C, D or E: Interactive listening is 

Read the abstract taken from an article written by Professor Dr. Reinildes Dias and answer question.     INTEGRAÇÃO DAS TIC AO ENSINO E APRENDIZAGEM DE LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA E O APRENDER COLABORATIVO ONLINE    ABSTRACT: My main focus is to discuss and reflect ____ the importance of the integration of information and communication technology resources with the aim of creating online learning communities to extend time and give more opportunities for interactions among participants in the target language. These online communities can be seen as collaborative networks for the joint construction of knowledge about the foreign language. Examples of both web and web 2.0 resources as well as of the application of principles related to DeskTop publishing are also provided throughout the article. Theoretical and practical aspects based on the collaborative learning approach give support to my work, also including vygostskian learning principles. 
(http://www.reinildes.com.br/incorporacaodasticsmoara2008.pdf. Acessed on March 2nd, 2013.)    Write True (T) or False (F) for the sentences below according to the same article:    (  ) In terms of language teaching, Dias recommends the association of the vygostikyan view of knowledge construction, genre pedagogy and the integration of technological resources. 
(  ) Dias affirms that the integration of technological tools to the classroom environment is enough to make teaching techniques adequate to the 21st century students’ needs. 
(  ) According to the article, students are required to comprehend authentic texts and to be able to produce similar texts of the same genre. 
(  ) Writing short paragraphs about specific themes is an example of a task based on the notion of writing as social practice. 
(  ) Writing activities should follow a circular and recursive process that involves the production of a first draft, followed by peer revision and the teacher’s feedback.    The CORRECT sequence is: 

English as Language of Global Education When economics students returned this winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure here, copies of a simple one-page petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language. “We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientifc felds, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English. In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last fve years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization. Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. The former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but ultimately was not re-elected to his post in December. In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students. Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Va. “We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives. “It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.” This year the university is celebrating its 100th anniversary in its adopted tongue. Its new publicity flm debuted in English and French. Along one of the main roads leading into Paris loomed a giant blue billboard boasting of the anniversary in French and, in smaller letters, in English. Essec has also taken advantage of the increased revenue that foreign students — English-speaking ones — can bring in. Its population of foreign students has leapt by 38 percent in four years, to 909 today out of a student body of 3,700. The tuition for a two-year master’s degree in business administration is 19,800 euros for European Union citizens, and 34,000 euros for non-EU citizens. “The French market for local students is not unlimited,” said Christophe N. Bredillet, the associate dean for the Lille School of Management’s M.B.A. and postgraduate programs. “Revenue is very important, and in order to provide good services, we need to cover our expenses for the library and research journals. We need to cover all these things with a bigger number of students so it’s quite important to attract international students.” With the jump in foreign students, Essec now offers 25 percent of its 200 courses in English. Its ambition is to accelerate the English offerings to 50 percent in the next three years. Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities. “English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.” He carries out conversation on a blog, deanstalk.net, in English. But getting students to feel comfortable speaking English in the classroom is easier said than done. When younger French students at Essec start a required course in organizational analysis, the atmosphere is marked by long, uncomfortable silences, said Alan Jenkins, a management professor and academic director of the executive M.B.A. program. “They are very good on written tasks, but there’s a lot of reticence on oral communication and talking with the teacher,” Dr. Jenkins said, adding that he used role-playing to encourage students to speak. He also refuses to speak in French. “I have to force myself to say, ‘Can you give me that in English?’ ” Offcials at Ewha Womans University in Seoul are also aware that they face a diffcult task at the frst stage of their Global 2010 project, which will require new students to take four classes in English, two under the tutelage of native English-speaking professors. The 120-year-old university has embarked on a hiring spree to attract 50 foreign professors. At the beginning, “teaching courses in English may have less effciency or effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer than those courses taught in Korean,” said Anna Suh, program manager for the university’s offce of global affairs, who said that students eventually see the benefts. “Our aim for this kind of program is to prepare and equip our students to be global leaders in this new era of internationalization.” The Lille management school is planning to open a satellite business school program next fall in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the working language will also be in English. “Internationally, the competition is everywhere,” Dr. Bredillet said. “For a master’s in management, I’m competing with George Washington University. I’m competing with some programs in Germany, Norway and the U.K. That’s why we’re delivering the curriculum in English.
According to the text:

iPad: Pushing More Americans to Pay More for Wireless Service
Posted by Olga Kharif on January 27
On Jan. 27, Apple said it will soon make available a version of its iPad tablet computer able to run over AT&T‟s wireless network, as long as you pay $15 or $30 a month for service. The device could usher in the era of more people paying wireless charges for multiple mobile devices.
In other parts of the world, paying for multiple mobile devices is already commonplace. In Italy, people often own several phones, one for calling and one for messaging. And Americans should follow suit. In a few years, each American will own four or five mobile devices, each of them requiring a voice or a data plan, figures wireless expert Chetan Sharma.
A small percentage of Americans already pays for service for several mobile devices. Amazon‟s Kindle e-reader comes with wireless connectivity to Sprint Nextel‟s network priced in. Some consumers pay monthly charges for data cards, allowing them to connect their laptops to wireless networks. The iPad, which some analysts expect to sell 5 million units in its first year, could push the idea of paying for service for non-phone devices into the mainstream. If the iPad takes off, that is.
That, in turn, could lead to the introduction of family plans for devices, an idea analysts have talked about for years. A carrier might sell you a pool of wireless minutes and data access to be used by your stable of three or four wireless devices, such as a tablet, a gaming console, a car navigation system and your phone.
Clearly, as Americans snap up more wireless gadgets that require wireless plans, carriers stand to benefit, big time. Their costs in pushing these gadgets to consumers should be low: The devices‟ manufacturers will do the heavy lifting of marketing and selling the gadgets in their stores. The devices won‟t necessarily have to be subsidized; AT&T won‟t subsidize the iPad, Jefferies analyst Jonathan Schildkraut says in a Jan. 27 note. The carriers will likely have to share service revenues with the manufacturers, though, and those service fees may be smaller than regular phone charges. But even those fees could drive the carriers‟ growth for years to come, Sharma says.
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2010/01/ipad_pushing_mo.html
From the text we see that Chetan Sharma is

Dear Mayor Estrosi, Mayor Vivoni, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, and other French officials who have supported France’s burkini ban:     My name is Amara Majeed, and I am a 19-yearold Muslim Sri Lankan American. I am a student at Brown University, studying cognitive neuroscience and public policy.
When I look at the photo circulating of a woman in Nice being surrounded by armed police officers as she is coerced into removing her clothing, because French officials deemed the burkini to be inappropriate beach attire, I see infringement on a woman’s right to choose what she puts on her body by a group of white males. I see the scapegoating, ostracization, and criminalization of Muslims in the aftermath of the Nice terror attacks. I am a woman who wears the hijab, and I see an affront to the rights and civil liberties of women like me.
Deputy Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi: You have stated that you support this ban on “inappropriate clothing” in the wake of the Nice terror attacks. Mayor Vivoni, you have described the burkini ban as a necessary measure to “protect the population.” Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, you have labeled the burkini as a symbol of extremism.
Let me respond to all of you by saying this: any conflation of the burkini with terrorism is invalid, virulent, and discriminatory. Tell me, in what way does our way of dress pose a threat to France’s national security? In what way does the burkini propagate hateful, violent ideologies? How is it that our way of dress poses a national security threat, yet some wetsuits, which take on strikingly similar designs to the burkini, aren’t? While France’s highest administrative court has now overturned the ban, the damage has already been done — this attack on the Muslim way of dress only serves as fodder to the already existing rising anti-Muslim sentiment and stigmatization of Muslims in France. If this institutionalized Islamophobia and fearmongering is being perpetrated by French officials and authorities, I fear how the general public’s poor treatment of hijab-clad women may be exacerbated in the coming weeks. We’re all well aware that hate crimes and violence targeting Muslim women wearing the hijab is not a new phenomenon in France.
As one burkini-clad woman who was forced to leave the beach states, “Because people who have nothing to do with my religion have killed, I no longer have the right to go to the beach.” In the eyes of many authority figures, our religious identity in and of itself is incriminating. Our way of dress is incriminating. Our sheer existence is incriminating.
Many of you have called the hijab an emblem of oppression. In April, France’s Minister for Women’s Rights equated women who choose to wear the hijab with “Negroes who were in favor of slavery.” More recently, France’s prime minister stated that the burkini is a tool of “enslavement,” and former French President Sarkozy insinuated that hijabclad women are imprisoned.
I am genuinely tired of individuals like you imposing your brand of colonial feminism on us and telling us that we are oppressed, that we have been indoctrinated, that this was not our choice, and that we need to be unshackled. Instead of continuing to pursue these offensive and failing attempts at liberating us, I implore you to liberate yourselves from this white savior complex and recognize that we don’t need your saving. The hijab does not oppress me. For me, the hijab is a symbol of feminism and freedom of expression — so who are you to invalidate my experiences, to invalidate a fundamental, inextricable aspect of my identity, and to label me as enslaved, as imprisoned, as oppressed? By depriving us of our rights to dress the way we want, by making public spaces inaccessible to us, by publicly humiliating us and coercing us to remove some of our clothing while we are trying to enjoy a day at the beach — you are oppressing us.
My news feed has been saturated with people posting photos of a Muslim woman at a beach being forced to strip, captioned with outrage and vitriol towards this form of discrimination. While your support of our rights is appreciated, I ask that you refrain from doing a disservice to this individual by circulating this photo. It may not seem like you are violating a woman’s privacy and liberties by sharing a picture revealing her arms or shoulders, but it is incumbent upon us to understand that she did not freely choose to show those parts of her body in public. Even if the intent is to excoriate the burkini ban while circulating these photos, I implore you to not be complicit, whether directly or indirectly, in systems of oppression that are stripping women, literally, of their right to choose what they wear. Yours truly,
Amara Majeed – a muslin woman (Source: http://www.bustle.com/articles/180721-an-open-letter-tofrench-officials-who-support-the-burkini-ban-from-a-muslim-woman)
Observe the following excerpt: “In the eyes of many authority figures, our religious identity in and of itself is incriminating. Our way of dress is incriminating. Our sheer existence is incriminating”. Considering the sentences above, mark the alternative that best describes the usage of the word “sheer” in the context above. 

THERE ARE 10 QUESTIONS OF MULTIPLE CHOICE IN YOUR TEST BASED ON THE TEXT “THE PLACE OF ‘CULTURE’ IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: A REFLECTION”. EACH QUESTION HAS 4 ALTERNATIVES (A, B, C, AND D) FROM WHICH ONLY ONE IS CORRECT. CHECK THE CORRECT ONE. The Place of "Culture" in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Reflection    Ramona Tang
In the field of foreign language teaching, one aspect that occasionally emerges as a topic of discussion is the relationship between knowledge of a foreign language, and knowledge of the culture from which that language "originated". From my (admittedly limited) experience with foreign language education, it would appear that the question of "culture" is often relegated to the end of a language teaching plan. It seems as if it is always something of a bonus if the teacher manages to find time to introduce a bit of the culture of the foreign language into the classroom - some music perhaps, or a traditional dance, in the final lesson of the course. If learners are particularly lucky, they get a chance to spend a month in the foreign country to "immerse" themselves in the "culture" of the country. But is that one class session enough? Is one month enough? Is it necessary?  

According to Pica (1994: 70), the question "how necessary to learning a language is the learner's cultural integration?" is something which "troubles teachers, whether they work with students in classrooms far removed from the culture of the language they are learning or with students who are physically immersed in the culture but experientially and psychologically distant from it". Numerous other researchers have tried to address issues along similar lines, including Gardner and Lambert (1972) who postulate that learners may have two basic kinds of motivation. The first is integrative motivation, which refers to the desire of language learners to acquire the language while immersing themselves into the whole culture of the language, in order to "identify themselves with and become part of that society" (Brown 1994: 154). The second is instrumental motivation, which refers to the functional need for learners to acquire the language in order to serve some utilitarian purpose, such as securing a job, or a place at a university. The argument is that such instrumentally motivated learners are neither concerned with the culture from which their target language emerged, nor interested in developing any feelings of affinity with the native speakers of that language.  

But questions of this sort and research of this sort appear to me to presuppose that culture can be separated from language, that culture is something that needs to be introduced into the language classroom and to the learner, and that learner and teacher have some sort of a choice as to whether "cultural integration" is to be included in the "syllabus" or not. I would like to suggest that language and culture are inextricably linked, and therefore it may be pointless, and perhaps even impossible, to ask ourselves: "how much of the culture of a country should be taught along with the language?"  

Does this then mean that the "integrative" and "instrumental" motivation which have been discussed for years do not exist? Is that what I am saying? No. I think the person who has "integrative" motivation simply acknowledges that he or she is actively seeking to know about the culture, whereas the person with "instrumental" motivation does not want to add anything on to his or her knowledge of the language. He or she may not want to sample the food, or get to know the night-life, or visit places that have nothing to do with work, or read about the history of the country, or chat with shopkeepers behind the counter of a grocery store to find out whether that high-rise across the road was once a park where children played. But those are frills; those are extras. Language itself is already culture, and therefore it is something of a moot point to talk about the inclusion or exclusion of culture in a foreign language curriculum. We might perhaps want to re-envisage the situation as a contrast between an active and deliberate immersion in culture, and a non-deliberate exposure to it.  
To conclude, I expect that some may disagree with my rather "deterministic" view that language is culture. A counterargument could well be that some people who decide to learn French, for instance, have no inkling at all of French culture. Indeed, they may not even know where France is on the map. How then can language be culture for them? To such a counterargument, I would say that while there may in theory be cases of such isolated individuals, I believe that in reality this is rather unlikely. But more than that, even if the learners themselves are not initially aware of the cultural associations attached to the language they are learning, others are, and will perceive them as being aligned with that culture. And if social theories of identity formation are to be believed (e.g. Brooke 1991), a person's identity is a social construct, and is (in part or in whole) the product of societal perception. I would like to add here that I am not in any way suggesting that a person cannot actively and deliberately reject the "cultural baggage" that accompanies a language. I am merely suggesting that it is there, and therefore we might want to consider not treating language and culture as if they were ultimately separable.  
(http://iteslj.org/Articles/Tang-Culture.html) 

According to the author of the text,

Choose the correct question to each answer:
I’m buying hygiene products.

Google Doodle celebrates Franz Kafka’s 130th birthday with ‘The Metamorphosis’ tribute Google has created a ‘doodle’ in tribute to Franz Kafka on the 130th anniversary of the German-language novelist’s birth.
The doodle is based on Kafka’s 1915 novella ‘The Metamorphosis’ – considered by many to be one of the most important works of fiction of the 20th Century – and shows the character Gregor Samsa walking into a room in the guise of a large insect.
In the much-celebrated work, Samsa is a travelling salesman who transforms into an insect overnight. The rest of novella focuses on his struggle to come to terms with his new existence and the burden it places on his family.
Kafka was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family on 3 July 1883 in Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He originally trained as a lawyer but began writing short stories in his spare time - eventually coming to consider it his calling – despite only a handful of his works being published during his lifetime.
Regarded as one of the 20th Century’s most influential authors, Kafka’s works are dominated by unreliable narrators who often tell dark tales of existentialist difficulties.
Kafka’s notoriously difficult relationship with his father Hermann is believed to have strongly influenced his work – with The Metamorphosis itself thought to be based upon Kafka’s own fears of insignificance and repulsiveness to his own family.
From: HALL, John. Available at: <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-doodlecelebrates-franz-kafkas-130th-birthday-with-the-metamorphosis-tribute-8685557.html>.
In the two excerpts “one of the most important works of fiction of the 20th century” and “one of the 20th Century’s most influential authors”, it can be verified superlative adjectives. It is another case of superlative adjective: 

Nature in danger of extinction[
We are destroying our forests faster than any other ecological zone in our planet. 
Forests cover only 6% of the Earth’s lands but they have between 50% to 90% of all plant and animal species from the planet. But unfortunately, humanity is destroying the forests faster and faster.
Many species of the rainforests (the ones that are located in a tropical area and which receive a lot of rain) benefit all of us. Many medicines (pharmaceuticals), for example, come from the rainforest. China, Brazil, Australia, and Mexico have a large number of species in extinction.
We are losing 50-100 species of plants and animals every day. Lost of species become extinct from natural processes. If we lose 50% of our planet’s species, it will take evolution 5-20 million years to replace them. Humans should help endangered species. We can work together to stop this destruction!
(Adapted from www.trentu.ca/ers/sheperd/lecture1.html#summary,
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id= 654432006 . 
Accessed: April 2006. )
From fifty to _____ per cent of all plant and animal species live in the forests.

Jane and Peter are spending a lot of money.