Questões de Concurso Sobre voz ativa e passiva | passive and active voice em inglês

NO MAN'S LAND

Mystery of world's only stretch of unclaimed land with NO laws that farmer tried to seize to make daughter a princess

Hidden deep in the African desert lies one of the strangest pieces of land on Earth — not for its beauty, wealth, or strategic value, but because no country wants it.

Bir Tawil is a 2,060-square-kilometre patch of barren desert between Egypt and Sudan, which remains an unusual geopolitical anomaly after decades of being unclaimed.

Those daring to go there face a tough journey, driving through remote desert roads past relics of gold mines and, at times, crossing paths with armed gangs and bandits.

Bir Tawil has long been a quirky favourite for small, often tongue-in-cheek, self-declared "countries" - usually founded by ordinary people across the globe.

With no laws, the land has even drawn would-be "kings," including a US dad who trekked there to fulfil his young daughter's wish of becoming a princess.

Jeremiah Heaton, a Virginia farmer, planted a flag and declared Bir Tawil the "Kingdom of North Sudan" so that his daughter Emily could have a royal title. While the move had no legal bearing, it sparked global interest and debate over land claims and the nature of sovereignty. 

As the dad tells it, Emily had casually asked if she could be a princess, and Heaton, wanting to make her dream come true, started looking for a way to make that happen. While most parents might have gently explained the impracticality of such a request, Heaton took it as a challenge. He began researching unclaimed land where he could theoretically establish a kingdom for Emily, at the time aged six.

In June 2014, Heaton headed to northeastern Africa, reaching Bir Tawil after a challenging journey through the desert. With a homemade blue flag bearing a crown symbol and the name "Heaton," he ceremoniously planted it in the sand, declaring Bir Tawil the "Kingdom of North Sudan" and himself its king. He immediately proclaimed Emily to be a princess, therefore "granting" her the royal title she had wished for.

In 2017, Suyash Dixit, an IT entrepreneur from Indore, India, also claimed Bir Tawil as his own, naming it the "Kingdom of Dixit." After a challenging journey across the desert, he planted a flag, declared himself king, and even "appointed" his father as prime minister. He posted his claim and experience on social media, where it garnered significant attention and sparked a wave of jokes and memes.

There are rumours, though largely unsubstantiated, that Bir Tawil contains hidden gold deposits.

While Egypt and Sudan have both had ancient ties to gold mining, particularly in the Nubian Desert, Bir Tawil itself is rarely studied or mined. These rumours, however, have attracted a few treasure hunters and adventurers over the years, hoping to uncover hidden riches in the desert.

Some have even joked about Bir Tawil as a potential "backup homeland" for populations affected by natural disasters. While obviously impractical, the idea underscores the paradox of unclaimed land in a time when territorial disputes are common.

Despite several stunts and theories, Bir Tawil remains unclaimed due to a unique border dispute between Egypt and Sudan.

The journey to Bir Tawil is lengthy and can take anywhere from two days to a week, depending on the starting point, route, and conditions. Due to its isolation and extreme desert environment, the journey requires careful planning, local knowledge, and permission from authorities in Egypt or Sudan.

Most travellers begin in Aswan, Egypt, or Khartoum, Sudan, as these are the nearest large cities with transportation infrastructure. From Aswan, the trip typically involves a long desert drive heading southward toward the Egypt-Sudan border.

Both countries monitor the border area closely, with visitors needing permits and a good guide familiar with the region. Egypt, in particular, restricts movement near the border, especially in sensitive zones close to the Hala'ib Triangle.

The trip to Bir Tawil from either Egypt or Sudan covers hundreds of kilometres across remote, rugged desert terrain. Explorers often follow dirt tracks used by nomadic tribes, miners, or military patrols, though few roads are mapped or maintained. The drive can take days and usually involves off-road vehicles capable of handling deep sand and rough trails.

There are no towns, water sources, or services along the way, so travellers must bring ample water, food, fuel, and spare parts. And to make matters worse, armed gangs, smugglers, and bandits often prey upon those venturing in the desert, particularly along less-monitored routes.

The origins of this unclaimed desert stretch back to British colonial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when overlapping boundary lines inadvertently left Bir Tawil in a legal limbo.

In 1899, while both Egypt and Sudan were under British administration, a formal border was established along the 22nd parallel north. This placed Bir Tawil, an arid and resource-poor patch of desert, in Egyptian territory, while a more valuable area, the Hala'ib Triangle, was assigned to Sudan.

But in 1902, the British changed the boundary to fit the local tribes' movements, putting Bir Tawil in Sudan instead and giving Egypt control over the fertile Hala'ib Triangle.

When Egypt and Sudan became independent, each country wanted the Hala'ib Triangle because it has good land and access to the Red Sea.

Egypt claims it based on the 1899 line, while Sudan uses the 1902 line to support its claim. Bir Tawil, a barren desert with no resources, has no value to either country.

To claim the Hala'ib Triangle, each country must reject Bir Tawil — because they can't claim both under their chosen boundary line. So by claiming Hala'ib, they essentially "give away" Bir Tawil, leaving it unwanted.

The territory is therefore unclaimed because Egypt and Sudan only want the valuable land next to it, not Bir Tawil itself.

For now, Bir Tawil endures as a strange relic of colonial history and an unlikely symbol of modern-day geopolitics — a land still ungoverned and, in all likelihood, destined to remain unclaimed.

Source:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30658172/bir-tawil-land-that-bel ongs-to-no-nation/ (adapted)

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30658172/bir-tawil-land-that-belongs-to-no-nation/

Read the text and answer the question.

Scientists store entire human genome on ‘memory crystal’ that could survive billions of years

By Rosa Rahimi, CNN. Published 7:53 AM EDT, Fri September 20, 2024

The crystal features a visual key, intended to explain what it contains to whoever finds it. University of Southampton/PA 

Scientists in the United Kingdom have stored the entire human genome on a “5D memory crystal,” in the hope that it could be used in the future as a blueprint to bring humanity back from extinction.

The crystal, which was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, could also be used to create a record of plant and animal species faced with extinction.

It can hold up to 360 terabytes of information for billions of years and can withstand extreme conditions, including freezing, fires, direct impact force, cosmic radiation and temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the university said in a press statement published Thursday.

In 2014, the crystal was awarded the Guinness World Record for “most durable digital storage material.” Kazansky’s team used ultra-fast lasers to inscribe the human genome data into voids as small as 20 nanometers (a nanometer is about one-billionth of a meter).

They describe the data storage on the crystal as 5D because the information is translated into five different dimensions of its nanostructures — their height, length, width, orientation and position.

“The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored should science in the future allow,” said Peter Kazansky, a professor of optoelectronics, who led the team at Southampton.

The team had to consider who – or what – would retrieve the information, so far off into the future.

It could be an intelligence (species or machine) – or it could be found in a future so distant that no frame of reference would exist for it. To help whoever finds it, the researchers included a visual key.

“The visual key inscribed on the crystal gives the finder knowledge of what data is stored inside and how it could be used,” said Kazansky.

“Their work is super impressive,” said Thomas Heinis, who leads research on DNA storage at Imperial College London and was not involved in the study. However, he says questions remain about how such data could be read in the future.

“What Southampton presents probably has a higher durability, however, this begs the question: what for? Future generations? Sure, but how will they know how to read the crystal? How will they know how to build the device to read the crystal? Will the device be available in hundreds of years?” he added. “I can barely connect my 10-year-old iPod and listen to what I listened back then.”

For now, the crystal is stored in the Memory of Mankind archive, a time capsule within a salt cave in Austria.

In 2018, Kazansky and his team used the memory crystal technology to store Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy of science fiction books, which were then launched into space aboard a Tesla Roadster. The technology has also been used to store major documents from human history, including the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights and the Magna Carta. Earlier this year, scientists revealed a plan to safeguard Earth’s species in a cryogenic biorepository on the moon, intended to save species in the event of a disaster on our home planet.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/science/human-genome-crystal-intl-scli/index.html 

Read the text III to answer the question.

TEXT III 

A new report into world education shows Finland has the best system. The global study is called "The Learning Curve" and is from the British magazine "The Economist". It aims to help governments provide a better education to students. The 52-page report looked at the education system in 50 countries. Researchers analysed millions of statistics on exam grades, literacy rates, attendance, and university graduation rates. Asia did well in the report, with South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore finishing second, third, fourth and fifth. The United States came 17th in the study, while Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia filled the bottom three positions in the top 50. 

The Learning Curve reported on five things that education leaders should remember. The first is that spending lots of money on schools and teachers does not always mean students will learn. Second is that "good teachers are essential to high-quality education". The report said teachers should be "treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine". Numbers three and four are that a country's culture must have a strong focus on the importance of education, and parents have a key part to play. Finally, countries need to "educate for the future, not just the present." The report said: "Many of today's job titles…simply did not exist 20 years ago."

Sources:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=421944&c=1 http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/content/download/bankname/components/filename/FINAL%20LearningCurve_Final.pdf 3

Google as well as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL among

others are gearing up to keep a much closer eye on all of us,

so that within five years these and other firms will routinely

track our movements, friends, interests, purchases and

5 correspondence – then make money by helping marketers

take advantage of the information.

These companies' brash plans are pushing us toward a

thorny choice that will determine the future of computing.

Google and other Web-oriented, information-service giants are

10 determined to build a breathtaking array of services based on

your personal information, and they're betting you'll be willing

to share it with them in order for you to reap the benefits. But

if we cooperate and let them in on the details of our lives, we'll

lose much of our privacy, and possibly a lot more.

15 A privacy backlash, however, would stifle these potentially

revolutionary services before they get off the ground – and

leave the computer industry's biggest plans for growth in

tatters. That may be just what some people want. The U.S.

Congress is considering four bills that would make it illegal to

20 collect and share information online or through cell phones

about people without clearer warning and permission. These

sorts of restrictions are already in effect throughout much of

Europe, thanks in part to European Union directives on privacy

and electronic communications passed in 2002 and 2003.

25 The good news is that there's no reason to choose

between technology and privacy. New technologies are

emerging that can doctor our data so that companies know

just enough about us to ply us with customized services, while

preventing them from getting a clear picture of our private

lives. The question is again one of trust: in this case, whether

people will come to trust the companies that are trying to build

these new technologies.

(abridged from Next Frontiers in Newsweek, April 3, 2006)

INSTRUCTIONS: Read the text carefully and then answer the questions from 33 to 38 by choosing the correct alternative.

Brazil corruption scandals: All you need to know

For the past three years, Brazil has been gripped by a scandal which started with a state-owned oil company and grew to encapsulate people at the very top of business - and even presidents.

On the face of it, it is a straightforward corruption scandal - albeit one involving millions of dollars in kickbacks and more than 80 politicians and members of the business elite.

But as the tentacles of the investigation dubbed Operation Car Wash fanned out, other scandals emerged.

It has led to some of those who have found themselves accused claiming they are the victims of political plots, designed to bar them from office.

What is Operation Car Wash?

Operation Car Wash began in March 2014 as an investigation into allegations that Brazil's biggest construction firms overcharged state-oil company Petrobras for building contracts.

Investigators accused directors at the firm - named the world's most ethical oil and gas company in 2008 - of skimming the extra money off the top as a bribe for awarding the contract.

Which is bad enough - but then the Workers' Party found itself dragged into the corruption scandal amid allegations of having funneled some of these funds to pay off politicians and buy their votes and help with political campaigns.

Among those accused in the scandal were dozens of politicians, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - the country's extremely popular former president, known affectionately as "Lula".

Read the excerpt below and answer the questions 34 to 40.

1. The transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States formed one of those unbelievable incidents of
2. history because by 1867, Russia was nervously eager to get rid of it, while the United States still
3. recovering from the Civil War and immersed in the impending impeachment of President Johnson,
4. refused to accept it on any terms.
5. At this impasse an extraordinary man monopolized center stage. He was not a Russian, a fact which
6. would become important more than a century later, but a soi-disant baron of dubious background; half
7. Austrian, half Italian, and a charmer who was picked up in 1841 for temporary duty representing Russia in
8. the United States and who lingered there till 1868. In that time, Edouard de Stoeckl, parading himself as a
9. nobleman, although no one could say for sure how or when or even if he had earned his title, became
10. such an ardent friend of America that he married an American heiress and took upon himself the task of
11. acting as marriage broker between Russia, which he called homeland, and the United States, his adopted
12. residence.
13. He faced a most difficult task, for when the United States showed hesitancy about accepting Alaska,
14. support for the sale withered in Russia, and later when Russia wanted to sell, half a dozen of the most
15. influential American politicians led by Secretary of State William Seward of New York looked far into the
16. future and saw the desirability of acquiring Alaska to serve as America's artic bastion, yet the hard-
17. headed businessmen in the Senate, the House and the general public opposed the purchase with all the
18. scorn they could summon. 'Seward's Icebox' and 'Seward's Folly' were two of the gentler jibes. Some
19. critics accused Seward of being in the pay of the Russians; others accused De Stoeckl of buying votes in
20. the House. One sharp satirist claimed that Alaska contained nothing but polar bears and Eskimos, and
21. many protested that America should not accept this useless, frozen domain even if Russia wanted to give
22. it away.
23. Many pointed out that Alaska had no wealth of any kind, not even reindeer, which proliferated in other
24. northern areas, and experts affirmed that an arctic area like this could not possibly have any minerals or
25. other deposits of value. On and on went the abuse of this unknown and somewhat terrifying land, and the
26. castigations would have been comical had they not influenced American thinking and behavior and
27. condemned Alaska to decades of neglect.
28. But an ingenious man like Baron de Stoeckl was not easily diverted from his main target, and with
29. Seward's unflinching support and admirable statesmanship, the sale squeaked by with a favorable margin
30. of one vote. By such a narrow margin did the United States come close to losing one of her potentially
31. valuable acquisitions, but of course, had one viewed Alaska from the vantage point of frozen Fort Nulato
32. in 1867, with the thermometer at minus-fifty-seven and about to be attacked by hostile Athapascans, the
33. purchase at more than $7,000,000 would have seemed a poor bargain.
34. Now the comedy intensified, became burlesque, for although the U.S Senate had bought the place,
35. the U.S. House refused to appropriate the money to pay for it, and for many tense months the sale hung
36. in the balance. When a favorable vote was finally taken, it was almost negated by the discovery that
37. Baron de Stoeckl had disposed of $125,000 in cash for which he refused to give an accounting. Widely
38. suspected of having bribed congressmen to vote for land that was obviously worthless, the baron waited
39. until the sale was completed, then quietly slipped out of the country, his life's ambition having been
40. achieved.
41. One congressman with a keen sense of history, economics and geopolitics said of the whole affair:
42. 'If we were so eager to show Russia our appreciation of the help she gave us during the Civil War, why
43. didn't we give her the seven million and tell her to keep her damned colony? It'll never be of any use to
44. us.'

Excerpt from: MICHENER, James A. Alaska. Fawcett Books: New York, 1988, p. 369 - 370.

Instruction: Answer questions 41 to 53 based on the following text.

Why Learning Is A New Procrastination

1. The tremendous world of online courses, blogs, social media, free eBooks, podcasts, and
2. webinars provides the best ever opportunity to broaden your knowledge in almost every sphere
3. you can imagine. Thanks to technological advancement and the instant access to the internet,
4. everyone can now study from home. It seems like it would be foolishly not to seize this
5. opportunity and improve your skills and knowledge. Moreover, you are kind of forced to do so
6. since the contemporary world has raised the bar higher than ever before. It literally invited you
7. to gather the pace and ___________ even more.
8. It is not surprising that, ultimately, you try to be everywhere and do everything. No doubt,
9. you do your best to constantly gather tiny bits of information from as many channels as
10. possible, because you are afraid that you will fall behind if you stop. After all, you enter a
11. learning crunch mode. You do not afford to miss anything and try to read every book you could
12. get your hands on. You listen to every single podcast your smartphone could download and take
13. every online course your paycheck would allow to take.
14. All in all, you learn. As much as possible. As intense as you manage to. You learn how to
15. write and publish a new book. You learn how to launch a successful blog. You learn how to hit
16. your goal on Kickstarter. You learn how to build the next “unicorn”. You learn how to land a job
17. of your dream. You learn how to successfully sell thousands of items on Amazon. You learn how
18. to make millions of dollars in passive income.
19. However, the problem is that you do everything except taking action. All those activities do
20. not take you closer to the things you want to accomplish. Better knowledge does not make you
21. more influential, powerful, and successful unless you apply it. The key secret to success is not
22. ________ expertise, but the ability to use it.
23. Knowledge is worthless unless it is applied. Needless to say that studying is crucial.
24. However, the thing is that it should take the entirely new form now. You should stop learning
25. from someone else’s experiences, knowledge, failures, and wins and start learning from your
26. own mistakes, adventures, ___________, and bold actions.
27. Learning has become a major trend of the 21st century. Sadly, it has also become a new
28. form of procrastination. You consciously postpone the first step justifying this by your eagerness
29. to broaden the knowledge and learn new things. You put the start date off justifying this by
30. your desire to pick up new skills that would help you succeed faster. You procrastinate over
31. chasing your own aspirations because doing the things on your own and creating your own story
32. of success is far more complicated than reading about someone else’s one. Meanwhile, no one
33. would really reproach you for wasting your time. Also, you feel comfortable about staying within
34. this zone of ease and convenience forever.
35. However, the point is that you already have and know everything you need to start off. In
36. fact, there is nothing more you need to learn in order to take the first step. Embrace the truth.
37. No matter how good your theoretical knowledge is, you will face a lot of obstacles while
38. applying it. You will have to deal with issues that have never been described or covered in any
39. book. You will have to look for the solutions and make the spontaneous decisions that no one
40. probably has ever thought of. You will have to design your own road to success.
41. Transform your learning process from the continuous the procrastination into an
42. unstoppable process of absorbing invaluable expertise based on your own experience. It might
43. seem counterintuitive, but the old-fashioned way of learning is what holds you back. This is
44. what makes your triumphs suck.
45. Constant learning, evaluating of ideas, thinking, and visualizing your journey towards your
46. major aspirations will not take you far from the place you are now. Actions will. You can sit and
47. research, and research, and research, while someone else is already reaping huge rewards for
48. his or her fruitful and hard work. Stop learning now. Become bold enough to take the first step
49. and start learning from your own experience.

Source: https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/why-learning-is-a-new-procrastination-104b53107e8b

The Rise of the “Bike Bus” Movement

01 On Earth Day* 2022, Sam Balto, a physical education teacher in Portland, convinced a few

02 dozen parents to send their kids to school on their bikes and posted the first in a series of videos

03 that turned his “bike bus” into a viral sensation. Balto has continued documenting his weekly

04 bike buses with joyous videos that show students rolling to school while he blasts music from an

05 eclectic collection of artists, including AC/DC, Metallica, and OneRepublic. Over time, these

06 boisterous bike buses have grown to more than 150 kids. “The more these kids practice riding

07 bikes, the more confident they become. And now they want to keep riding on non-bike bus days,

08 and even on rainy days!” said Balto.

09 Balto’s bike bus is much more than a fad. His TikTok and Twitter videos have raked in

10 millions of views, inspiring similar initiatives in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Utah, Ohio, and

11 Texas. Bike buses previously existed in European cities such as Barcelona and London, but new

12 ones in cities like Cape Town are now joining the trend. Nancy Pullen-Seufert, the director of the

13 National Center for Safe Routes to School, said biking and walking to school have myriad benefits,

14 including “improving air quality, improving safety for walkers and bicyclists, increasing physical

15 activity, and making it easier for school buses and others who can’t actively travel to school to

16 arrive to school on time.”

17 Balto has also triggered real political change by working with lawmakers to pass a so-called

18 “Bike Bus Bill”, that was signed into law by Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in August. “The bill

19 brings flexibility so school districts can now use student transportation funds, which were

20 previously only for school buses, to pay for crossing guards or adults to lead walking school buses

21 or bike buses. It’s awesome.” Balto said. And he is not the only bike bus leader driving positive

22 change in Oregon… Last year, Megan Ramey, who has been organizing a bike bus ___ 2020, was

23 named the Safe Routes to School Manager at Hood River County School District and since then,

24 she has secured nearly $11 million in funding to make it safer for kids to walk and bike to school.

25 “I feel like I'm in a cash-grabbing machine. We just got $7 million to create an off-road trail to

26 the high school. This means kids will be able to bike to high school on a green trail instead of a

27 car-centered road,” said Ramey.

28 Nearly 90% of kids walked to school in 1969. Half a century later, in 2017, that number

29 had fallen to just 10%. That year, a third of students took the school bus and more than half

30 were driven in a private vehicle. This has led to more pollution, with researchers finding that

31 toxic car fumes have an adverse effect on attention, reasoning, and academic performance

32 among school children. In New York, the Open Schools Program has helped increase biking and

33 walking in the 65 schools that restricted traffic during drop-off and pick-up times this year, said

34 Sabina Sethi Unni, who works at Open Plans, a non-profit that supports the shift to walkable

35 cities. “This program makes kids more comfortable with walking and biking at a young age. When

36 they get older, they will be cyclists instead of car users,” said Unni.

(Available in: https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-rise-of-the-bike-bus-movement – text especially adapted for this test).

*Earth Day: a day in April designated for promoting concern for the environment (Merriam-Webster).