Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

                                         Knowledge and the library

      It was not until the development of monastic libraries in Europe around 1200 that humanity amassed in a single place what approached the collective wisdom and knowledge of the age. Libraries may be exchanges of information and market places for ideas but they are also the buildings which contain the bulk of human knowledge. Or, at least they were until the electronic digitally stored information revolution of the 1980s.

      Now knowledge is virtually everywhere; it has broken free of the constraint of buildings. Today if you were today to destroy all the world’s libraries, it is unlikely that more than 20% of human knowledge would be lost. Certainly, a large amount of archival material would disappear forever, but a substantial volume of knowledge would survive. If a library is a repository of knowledge, this is now just one of its functions. The library’s prime function is now making that knowledge available and encouraging exchange and reflection upon it.

      Electronic knowledge is nowadays available to everybody – in the home, workplace, airport terminal, school, and so on. The Internet has liberated the library; nevertheless, it has not removed the justification for library facilities.

                 (www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978185617619410017X. Adaptado)

The main issues of the Brazilian port system

Since the beginning of the privatization of the Brazilian ports in 1995, the lessee companies of container terminals have invested approximately USD 1 billion acquisition of modern equipment, physical infrastructure, training of manpower and infrastructure.

Particularly after the injection of resources by the Federal Government through the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), the situation at the Brazilian ports started to improve.

Part of the dredging works in the main Brazilian ports are finished. With the sea deeper along the ports’ area, it is estimated that around 30% of the vessels worldwide that could not dock in Brazil before, now can.

But what used to be an issue at the sea, now it is an issue at the land. The logistical problems of access are evident, the bottleneck of access from the cargo container terminals generate unproductive periods, which are highly detrimental to the foreign trade and financial activity of Brazil. It is a fact that the rail network and roads in the vicinity of the ports are insufficient.

Another great matter about the Brazilian ports is the bureaucracy. Besides making everything more expensive, slowness in the Brazilian ports invented a truly “congestion at sea”. Every ship that arrives in the country waits at least 5.5 days to have the goods delivered by agencies such as IRS, the National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (ANVISA), the Ministry of Agriculture and the Docks. The world average is three days. 

In Brazil, the organs responsible for clearance of goods run only during business hours. It is the only country among the world’s major economies, which does not have these services available 24 hours.

Text VI.

                            Critical Discourse Analysis

      We have seen that among many other resources that define the power base of a group or institution, access to or control over public discourse and communication is an important "symbolic" resource, as is the case for knowledge and information (van Dijk 1996). Most people have active control only over everyday talk with family members, friends, or colleagues, and passive control over, e.g. media usage. In many situations, ordinary people are more or less passive targets of text and talk, e.g. of their bosses or teachers, or of the authorities, such as police officers, judges, welfare bureaucrats, or tax inspectors, who may simply tell them what (not) to believe or what to do.

      On the other hand, members of more powerful social groups and institutions, and especially their leaders (the elites), have more or less exclusive access to, and control over, one or more types of public discourse. Thus, professors control scholarly discourse, teachers educational discourse, journalists media discourse, lawyers legal discourse, and politicians policy and other public political discourse. Those who have more control over more ‒ and more influential ‒  discourse (and more properties) are by that definition also more powerful.

      These notions of discourse access and control are very general, and it is one of the tasks of CDA to spell out these forms of power. Thus, if discourse is defined in terms of complex communicative events, access and control may be defined both for the context and for the structures of text and talk themselves.

(van DIJK, T. A. Critical Discourse Analysis. In: SCHIFFRIN, D.; TANNEN, D.; HAMILTON, H. (eds.).   The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Wiley‐Blackwell, 2003. pp. 352‐371.)

            Technology in schools: Future changes in classrooms

      Technology has the power to transform how people learn - but walk into some classrooms and you could be forgiven for thinking you were entering a time warp. There will probably be a whiteboard instead of the traditional blackboard, and the children may be using laptops or tablets, but plenty of textbooks, pens and photocopied sheets are still likely.

      The curriculum and theory have changed little since Victorian times, according to the educationalist and author Marc Prensky. "The world needs a new curriculum," he said at the recent Bett show, a conference dedicated to technology in education. Most of the education products on the market are just aids to teach the existing curriculum, he says, based on the false assumption "we need to teach better what we teach today". He feels a whole new core of subjects is needed, focusing on the skills that will equip today's learners for tomorrow's world of work. These include problem-solving, creative thinking and collaboration.

'Flipped' classrooms

      One of the biggest problems with radically changing centuries-old pedagogical methods is that no generation of parents wants their children to be the guinea pigs. Mr Prensky he thinks we have little choice, however: "We are living in an age of accelerating change. We have to experiment and figure out what works."

      "We are at the ground floor of a new world full of imagination, creativity, innovation and digital wisdom. We are going to have to create the education of the future because it doesn't exist anywhere today." He might be wrong there. Change is already afoot to disrupt the traditional classroom. The "flipped" classroom - the idea of inverting traditional teaching methods by delivering instructions online outside of the classroom and using the time in school as the place to do homework - has gained in popularity in US schools. The teacher's role becomes one of a guide, while students watch lectures at home at their own pace, communicating with classmates and teachers online.

(Available in:https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30814302. Accessed on May 18st, 2019. Adapted. Author: Jane Wakefield.) 

                  The “Social Practice” of Teaching

      Examining teaching from the context of a ‘social practice’ may provide us with fresh insights that will challenge the accepted ways of seeing the world of teaching with important implications for faculty development. First, we will look at what we mean by a social practice and then see how teaching falls into that category. A social practice needs to be understood in terms of purpose, context, and a complex array of norms. A social practice is, first, a form of activity that has grown out of common needs in a community to accomplish certain purposes.

      A system of etiquette and a means for communication serve to make human society more civil. Second, a social practice involves shared and mutually understood ways of behaving or acting. Third, the patterns of action are guided by a complex array or norms that we might call rules, standards, principles, precepts, and unwritten policies. These norms have authority (people comply willingly), and they are created and recreated in and through the interactions of those involved in the practice (Case, 1990; Selman, 1989; MacIntyre, 1984; Taylor, 1983). The norms provide reasons for the actions or behaviors of individuals. As in etiquette using particular forms of address, handshaking, and removing or wearing particular headwear are the behaviors that constitute the practice.

      The behaviors have meaning only in terms of the context of that particular community and purpose and can only be explained in relation to the guiding norms. The feature of a social practice (they develop out of the common needs of the community) is clearly consistent with what has already been said about the purposive nature of teaching. Teaching is an activity that has grown out of the need in a community to pass on its knowledge, mores, and behaviors and in medical schools these are formulated as mission statements which include educational aims. To view teaching as a social practice is to acknowledge, first and foremost, the expectations society has for teaching, or in other words, the particular purposes of teaching.

(Available in: D’Eon, M., Overgaard, V., & Harding, S. R. (2000). Advances in Health Sciences Education, 5(2), 151–162. Accessed on May 18st, 2019. Adapted.)