Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

Choose the best synonym to “shroud” in the following context “The surprise result means the peace process is now shrouded by uncertainty.” 

Read the text below and answer the question:
To exercise or not to exercise ...
Are more young people overweight than in the past and do they exercise enough? We decided to ask four young people what they thought about this problem.
1- HEATHEROHURUOGU, aged 14 from Leeds, tells us what she thinks about keeping fit.   “I know there have been a lot of stories in newspapers about how fat young people are getting, but we're not all sitting at home at a computer eating crisps and chocolate. Some of us do actually realise that keeping fit is quite important. If anybody should be blamed, I think schools and parents are the problem. At my school we have fewer hours of PE lessons than we used to have. The school has decided we need to spend more time preparing for our exams. My mum and dad trust me to take a bus home if I stay late at school for hockey training, but my friend Carly can't come because her parents work and they are worried about her travelling alone.”
2- OLIVER MCKENNA, aged 15, Edinburgh, sees things differently.
“I don't like organised sport or spending my time with guys skateboarding. I love computers – programming them, playing games on them, surfing the Internet and in my free time that's what I do. It's true that I do need to lose some weight, though. Next week, Mum's taking me to a doctor so we can ask about going on a diet. Dad wants me to join the gym he goes to, but I think it's a bit boring working out all the time. In fact, there's a computer game now called Wii. I'm thinking of getting it because you actually do the actions of the games – you know, things like swinging your arm to hit the ball in tennis. That'd be a good way to get some exercise!”
3- REECEWILKINS, aged 13, Swansea, has another view.
“I'm an active person and so are most of my friends. We all like to spend some time on our Nintendos, PlayStations or whatever – all young people enjoy computer games – but we also belong to football teams or some kind of sports club. We don't have to make an effort to be fit – young people like active games. No, our problem is that we eat too much rubbish. In fact, we drink a lot of bad things – sweet, fizzy drinks which are full of sugar and very unhealthy. Also, we all love fast food and often eat hamburgers and chips. If we ate better, I think most of us would lose the extra weight we have.”

4- HANK DARROW, aged 14, London, shares his opinions with us.
“I've spent the last four years trying to lose weight, and it hasn't been easy. My problem started when I was a baby – it wasn't really my fault. You see, I wasn't very interested in food, and so my mum made all kinds of delicious things to get me to eat. Of course, all those tasty foods were very fattening. My mum used to carry a bowl of food everywhere we went and would follow me around the house or playground trying to get me to eat just one more bite. Well, I got used to eating constantly and, by the time we all realised that I had gained too much weight, the damage had been done. Now I follow a special diet – it was hard at first, but once I got used to it, I actually like it.And I look and feel so much better – I don't want to go back to the way I was.”
Taken from: CHAPMAN, Joanne. Laser B1 +. Teacher's book. Macmillan, 2008.
In the sentence: “Some of us do actually realise that keeping fit is quite important” (Heather's opinion), ACTUALLY means:

  Someone on your left speaks French and someone on your right speaks English; both individuals need to speak to each other. The systems analyst is the middleman, assessing the needs of the end-user and translating them into programming or turning over the programming responsibility to the development department. What are the business requirements? Who will comprise the user community? How large is the application going to be? Will it be internal or external? These are all questions facing the systems analyst, who spends much of the day in front of the computer poring over these issues.    With a new product, other elements come into play, such as network location, user community, type of machine, and portability. If the analyst is reviewing an established product, the user community will dictate its changes and enhancements. "One of the biggest surprises in my 25 years of technology work is that people who have a creative background as opposed to a degree in computer science tend to make better systems analysts," says one seasoned professional. "The best analysts I've come across came from backgrounds in theater, art, and filmmaking. But they were all able to see and grasp big-picture concepts very quickly, and break them down into subcomponents. People who have a computer science or math background tend to be very technical, and sometimes that can be a hindrance." Systems analysts need to be independent thinkers – people who can "think out of the box" by grasping concepts quickly and seeing the big picture as opposed to the small details. "I also look for someone who is self-motivated. Here take the ball and run with it and come back if you have any issues," says one employer who heads up a technology group. (http://www.princetonreview.com/cte/profiles/dayInLife.asp?careerID=210)
 No texto, poring over significa

Why Some State Immigration Laws are Welcoming but Others are Downright Hostile 1. Immigration policy reform has become a topic of almost daily national debate. Businesses, consumers, employers, labor unions, law enforcement offi cers, higher education offi cials, and not to mention immigrants themselves, all have something at stake in immigration policy reform. All of the recent discussion of immigration policy at the national level makes it easy to forget that signifi cant changes have already been made in immigration policy at the state level, many of which will likely affect the policy discourse and the nature of any policy changes at the national level. As the nation considers how to move forward with immigration policy reform, we should fi rst understand how we got to this point. What has shaped immigration policy changes at the state level in the last decade? 2. Using an analysis of all 50 states, James Monogan, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, fi nds that immigration policy is affected most by legislative professionalism, electoral ideology, state wealth, and change in the foreignborn population. Specifi cally, the more professional a legislature is, the more likely they are to enact welcoming laws toward immigrants, which Monogan suggests is likely because career politicians in these legislatures are more concerned with their future electoral prospects than those in less professional legislatures. In other words, state legislators are mindful of how opponents could garner votes in the next election and they consider this when voting on immigration policy. Not surprisingly, states with a more liberal electorate are more likely to take a welcoming stance on immigration policy, suggesting that policy makers are somewhat responsive to public opinion. Economics and demographics also play a role, as states with a higher per capita gross state product tend to pass more welcoming laws towards immigrants while states experiencing an increase in the foreign-born population tend to pass policies that are more hostile towards immigrants. 3. These results are quite interesting as they suggest that immigration policy is a function of the professional nature of a state’s legislature, public opinion in the state, overall state economic conditions, and state demographics. Monogan’s results offer a clear picture of how states have chosen to make changes to immigration policy over the last decade in the face of federal inaction. (Source: Jennifer Connolly, in Journal of Public Policy, May 20th, 2013, adapted
 Regarding the language underlined in the text, it can be said that 

Read the text to answer the following question.
Cultural diversity and cultural identity in globalization
In the process of globalization winners are the countries with highly developed mass media as complex systems which are able to broadcast and receive diverse information which are used as basic development resource. On the other side are the developing countries which suffer their impact. Their characteristic is the small capacity to adapt to innovations that came from outside and that is why their cultural identity is called into question. Mass media are not only instruments for spreading popular culture and industries, but at the same time, their use enables cultural hegemony. Mass media, society, local culture, and media content are closely related. By exhibiting TV shows, movies, dramas etc. media will reflect values specific to local culture. So, we can talk about displaying commerciality as feature of American culture, Japanese aesthetic values, French tendency to philosophize... One of the main functions of mass media is to transfer cultural inheritance, information about the past, values of a given society, and to furnish cultural directive for life, action, and behavior. Despite the globalization of the economy, and the emergence of international political institutions, global dissemination of culture (mass media, education, modernization, urbanization, the spread of literacy) from the late 20th century has strengthened national identities. Modern nationalism is less focused on defending the country and more inclined to defend the established cultural identity. The identities represent the defense against unpredictability, disorder, and changes of globalization. In the last three decades there is strong trend to resisting globalization and cosmopolitanism as a form of defense of cultural identity. “God, nations, families and communities will ensure eternal figures that cannot be broken down and around which society will develop a counter-culture of real virtuality”. Castells considers that individuals carry with them the eternal truth, the values that cannot be virtualized or destroyed. As the globalization process strengthens the coming of cultural integrity and identity problems are more prevalent. Dominant monoculture stands against local, national and traditional cultures with the progressive disintegration of traditional culture value patterns.
(Available: www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2013. Adapted.)
“Enables” (line 5) means