Questões de Concurso Comentadas sobre presente perfeito | present perfect em inglês

                                           Dr. Dweck’s research into growth mindset

                                                         changed education forever

Over 30 years ago, Carol Dweck and her colleagues became interested in students' attitudes about failure. They noticed that some students rebounded while other students seemed devastated by even the smallest setbacks. After studying the behavior of thousands of children, Dr. Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset to describe the underlying beliefs people have about learning and intelligence. When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement.

Recent advances in neuroscience have shown us that the brain is far more malleable than we ever knew. Research on brain plasticity has shown how connectivity between neurons can change with experience. With practice, neural networks grow new connections, strengthen existing ones, and build insulation that speeds transmission of impulses. These neuroscientific discoveries have shown us that we can increase our neural growth by the actions we take, such as using good strategies, asking questions, practicing, and following good nutrition and sleep habits. […]

So the researchers asked, “Can we change mindsets? And if so, how?” This began a series of interventions and studies that prove we can indeed change a person’s mindset from fixed to growth, and when we do, it leads to increased motivation and achievement. For example, 7th graders who were taught that intelligence is malleable and shown how the brain grows with effort showed a clear increase in math grades.

In addition to teaching kids about malleable intelligence, researchers started noticing that teacher practice has a big impact on student mindset, and the feedback that teachers give their students can either encourage a child to choose a challenge and increase achievement or look for an easy way out. For example, studies on different kinds of praise have shown that telling children they are smart encourages a fixed mindset, whereas praising hard work and effort cultivates a growth mindset. When students have a growth mindset, they take on challenges and learn from them, therefore increasing their abilities and achievement. […].

Source: https://www.mindsetworks.com/science/.Access:02/12/2019)

Australia fires: What's being done to fight the flames?

Large parts of Australia __________ (devastate) by the worst wildfires the country __________ (see) in decades, with huge blazes tearing through bush, woodland and national parks. Record-breaking temperatures and months of drought __________ (help) the fires burn an estimated 10 million hectares (100,000 sq km) of land since 1 July.

Bushfire conditions EASED over the weekend, giving fire crews a period of temporary respite. But authorities __________ (say) the huge fires will persist until there is substantial rainfall. More hot weather is __________ (expect) next week and the risk was far from over, they said. Thousands of firefighters are still battling blazes across large swathes of Australia - ranging in size from small fires to infernos burning across hectares of land. Entire towns have been engulfed and residents across several states have lost their homes. At least 28 people have died.

State and federal authorities have been working together to try to stem the spread. While they have managed to contain some within a matter of days, the biggest blazes have been burning for months.

At least 3,700 firefighters are on the ground at any one time across the country during the worst periods, according to the country's state fire services. Most are in the worst-hit states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. When fires have been at their worst, about 2,700 firefighters have been battling the blazes at any one time in NSW alone. Ben Shepherd, of the NSW Rural Fire Service, said his colleagues had dealt with 4.2m hectares of burning land this season, compared with the typical 300,000 hectares. "It's been an incredibly long campaign," he said.

Fire crews across the country have been joined by 3,000 army, navy and air force reservists who are assisting with search and rescue and clean-up efforts. Further support coming from the US, Canada, and New Zealand, who have sent additional teams and equipment to help.

                                         (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51008051 )

Text for the question.

Higher life expectancy worldwide 

Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set

Researchers find evidence of rising plastic pollution in an accidental source: log books for planktonmonitoring instruments. Matthew Warren 

Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades — by analysing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels. 

Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) — which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean — show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades.

This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, longterm data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I’m excited that this has been finally done,” he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications. 

 Although the findings are unsurprising, long-term data on ocean plastics had been scant: previous studies looked mainly at the ingestion of plastic by sea creatures over shorter timescales, the researchers say.

Fishing for data

CPRs are torpedo-like devices that have been used since 1931 to survey plankton populations, by filtering the organisms from the water using bands of silk. Today, volunteer ships such as ferries and container ships tow a fleet of CPRs around the world’s oceans. 

(…)Each time a ship tows a CPR, the crew fills in a log book and notes any problems with the device. So Ostle and her colleagues looked through all tow logs from the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, to determine whether plastic entanglements have become more common.

Evidence analysis

(…)Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn’t reveal much about the quantity of microplastics — fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long — in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear.

Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. “As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease,” he says.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01252-0 (adapted).

Access: April 20th, 2019 

TEXT II

What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book

Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham. 

The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics. 

Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.) 

Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos. 

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]

(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)

TEXT 1 below, retrieved and adapted from https://chroniclingamerica. loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1851-06-21/ed-1/seq-4/ on July 9th, 2018.

Text 1 

                    Women’s rights convention – Sojourner Truth

      One of the most unique and interesting speeches of the convention was made by Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave. It is impossible to transfer it to paper or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and truthful tones. She came forward to the platform and addressing the President said with great simplicity:

      "May I say a few words?" Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded: I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman has a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much; -- for we can't take more than our pint will hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if a woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Reference: Robinson, M. (1851, June 21). Women’s rights convention: Sojourner Truth. Anti-slavery Bugle, vol. 6 no. 41, Page 160.

      Goods in transit refers to merchandise and other inventory items that have been shipped by the seller, but have ..I.. been received by the purchaser. To illustrate goods in transit, let's use the following example. Company J ships a truckload of merchandise on December 30 to Customer K, which is located 2,000 miles away. The truckload of merchandise arrives at Customer K on January 2. Between December 30 and January 2, the truckload of merchandise is goods in transit. The goods in transit requires special attention if the companies issue financial statements as of December 31. The reason is that the merchandise is the inventory of one of the two companies. However, the merchandise is not physically present at either company. One of the two companies must add the cost of the goods in transit to the cost of the inventory that it has in its possession.

      The terms of the sale will indicate which company should report the goods in transit as its inventory as of December 31. If the terms are FOB shipping point, the seller (Company J) will record a December sale and receivable, and ..II..  include the goods in transit as its inventory. On December 31, Customer K is the owner of the goods in transit and will need to report a purchase, a payable, and must add the cost of the goods in transit to the cost of the inventory which is in its possession.

      If the terms of the sale are FOB destination, Company J will not have a sale and receivable until January 2. This means Company J must report the cost of the goods in transit in its inventory on December 31. (Customer K will not have a purchase, payable, or inventory of these goods until January 2.)

       (Adapted from http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-are-goods-in-transit) 

Based on TEXT 2, a fictional blog, answer question

TEXT 2

I do realize that in the world of technology there are early and late adopters. I’m not the earliest of cutting-edge early TESL adopters, but I do like to try out new technology and incorporate it into my teaching. This list is a handful of technologies that are established enough not to be too problematic, user-friendly enough that just about anyone can start using them quickly, and useful enough that you’ll soon wonder how you got along without them. In short, this is a list of tech that just about everyone can (and maybe even should) be using in 2010.

1. Wikipedia – It has become popular to question its accuracy. Wikipedia has become a real knowledge bank on the internet. Once we figure out what it is (a compilation of all referenced knowledge) many of these criticisms fall down. Access to all this information means a reorganization of learning.

2. Google – No, I don’t just mean search, but all the other stuff: maps, docs, calendar, etc. It’s never been so easy to collaborate with other people.

3. Twitter – A year ago, I taught a course through Twitter with mixed results. This microblog is almost exclusively interactive, but my ESL students found it tough to collaborate within Twitter because of its constraints on length. The email by contrast, is very simple – it is equally interactive but it is constraint free. So, you should use it and you should see interesting results !

Can you learn the language by using the above alone? Of course not! But they are a good springboard and I hope they lead you to discover all other media available out there (ebooks, blogs, YouTube videos, music, movies, etc.).

More web in the pipeline. Please post a comment.