Questões de Concurso

Read the text below and answer the question that follow:

Text 1:

What makes a school good? (Part I)

Everyone is concerned about the quality of education a school offers, but how is quality measured? We often hear that schools in some countries are excellent, while schools in other countries are filled with problems. What factors should we be looking at to judge how 'good' schools are or aren't? I decided to do some research on the topic to see if I could come up with some answers.

One way of deciding if a school is good is by looking at how many students go on to university when they leave. If you look at all the schools in the world, the country which sends the highest numbers of its students to university is Finland. So, I looked at conditions in Finnish schools to see what made them so successful.

Often you will hear people say that the best schools are those that are strict. So, are the schools in Finland very strict? The answer is no, they aren't. They are usually very informal places with teachers and students sharing ideas. In fact, Finnish schools have a unique way of dealing with students and this could be the reason why they are so successful. While students in many countries spend long hours in school studying boring subjects, lucky students in Finland have short school days and ten weeks of summer holidays.Added to that, lunch is free and there are lots of lessons in sport, music and art.

Also, Finnish schools seem to have a different philosophy. They believe in equality and making school seem like a home away from home, so students feel comfortable and enjoy going there. The aim of the schools is not only to focus on 'good' students but also to provide extra help to students that need it. The result of this is that less able students do much better in Finland than they would in other countries.

Taken from: Chapman, Joanne. Laser B1 +. Teacher's book. Macmillan, 2008.

You know a nun when you see one. The uniform, known as a habit, is a dead giveaway. But the outfit you’re picturing in your head might look very different from the one worn by the sisters at your local convent. And yet, each ensemble’s meaning is immediately clear. That’s because nuns abide by a sartorial system that is at once endlessly adaptable and instantly recognizable.

That’s an impressive feat for any visual system. In the case of nuns’ habits, that system relies on a standardized combination of symbolic elements. “It’s really a kit of parts”, says Lucienne Roberts, cofounder of a British publishing house devoted to design’s more esoteric subjects. For their latest book, Looking Good: A Visual Guide to the Nun’s Habit, Roberts worked with her team to dissect the dress of nuns from some 40 Catholic orders. The result is a fascinating work of reference on a subject to which you've almost certainly never paid much mind.

The book begins by cataloguing the various components that typically comprise a nun's habit. These may include things like veils, rosaries, tunics, medals, coifs (the cap worn under the veil), and sandals. It's a collection from which each religious order draws some, but not all, of its impeccable elements. This section provides the reader with a visual framework which relies on simple cues to distinguish between religious families.

For instance, many orders of nuns wear some form of girdle, be it a belt, a cord, or a cincture. Each type and subtype of garment carries specific connotations. Franciscan nuns, for instance, favor a cord over a leather belt, to reflect their order's devotion to poverty. Its four knots, plainly visible in the book as an illustration of the Franciscan garb, represent the order's vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and enclosure.

These are the kinds of minutiae encoded in the book's pages, which the authors color code to differentiate between the various orders. Even the nuns' orientation on the page is significant; some face towards the reader, while others face away. This is to distinguish between sisterhoods that are active in their communities from ones that live cloistered lives, respectively. The book itself, like the habits it analyzes, is a form of information design.

(1º§)Archaeologists have long assumed that the ancient society that erected the colossal Moai figures on Chile's Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, collapsed many centuries ago. Now, a new study indicates that the islanders' civilization was still going strong when Europeans arrived in 1722.

(2º§)The island was settled in the 13th century by Polynesians, and is known __ the famed Easter Island "heads" (many of the bodies have been buried by erosion over the centuries).

(3º§)The research, which appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, contests the accepted timeline that the Easter Island society was already in decline by the year 1600 and its massive stone statues left to fall into disrepair.

(4º§)Conducting radiocarbon dating on 11 sites __ Easter Island, the authors determined the timeline of each monument's construction. Their findings indicate that Easter Islanders were still actively building new Moai figures, and maintaining existing ones, up until at least 1750.s of fresh water-a precious resource. As well as moments to their ancestors, it turns out they may have also served a more utilitarian purpose.

(5º§)Further supporting these results are historical documents __ the island's first European visitors. Written accounts from the Dutch explorers who arrived in 1722 found that the monuments were in active ritual use, with no signs of decline, and the same goes for the Spaniards who landed in 1770. It was only in 1774 that James Cook found the giant statues in ruins and the figures knocked over.

(6º§)"The way we interpret our results and this sequence of historical accounts is that the notion of a pre-European collapse of monument construction is no longer supported," lead author Robert DiNapoli told Archaeology & Arts.

(7º§)"Once Europeans arrive on the island, there are many documented tragic events due to disease, murder, slave raiding and other conflicts," added co-author Carl Lipo. "The degree to which [the Rapa Nui people's] cultural heritage was passed on-and is still present today through language, arts, and cultural practices-is quite notable and impressive. I think this degree of resilience has been overlooked due to the collapse narrative and deserves recognition."

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    Our first goal as language teachers is always to encourage our learners to make use of their developing language. Giving them a genuine communicative purpose and making it personal to them are two good ways of achieving this. For students beginning their journey to greater self-awareness, teachers could devise an inventory of learning skills for them to rate themselves on. This could include items such as ‘I keep my notes in order’, ‘I always make a note of homework and the date it should be done’ or whatever is appropriate to their level. Students could rate themselves privately, but then discuss with other students which ones they find most challenging, exchanging tips about how they could improve these aspects of learning. From these discussions, it will probably become clear that some students have already got good study strategies in place, even if some of them seem a little unusual. Revisiting the checklist later in the course helps learners to reflect on how they have improved and what they still need to work on. […]

    Making use of materials that include a diverse range of characters is another great way of initiating discussion and raising awareness of the issues. There may be no explicit mention made in the text of this diversity, thereby sending the implicit message that this is just how the world is. Students may see characters that they can relate to more easily, and feel more included generally. Other materials, such as the ‘Adventures on Inkling Island’ comic strips, explicitly showcase the daily challenges and talents of neurodiverse people, demonstrating that being different can be a strength in some situations.

    A powerful way of enabling people to understand how it might feel to be in the minority on a daily basis, whether in terms of physical abilities or cognitive function, is to set up experiential activities which challenge the participants to perform unusual tasks in conditions that make their usual way of working impossible. As well as being a fun way of introducing the topic for further discussion, these activities are usually very memorable and drive home the message that – in the vast majority of cases – lack of success in academic tasks is not due to laziness or stupidity.

Adapted from: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/raising-awarenessdiversity-language-classroom