Questões de Concurso Comentadas por alunos sobre palavras conectivas | connective words em inglês

Read text I and answer questions 31 to 33.
The web makes waves in Brazil

Atenção: As questões de números 56 a 60 referem-se ao texto apresentado abaixo.

A Laptop Designed to Take a Licking and Keep on Ticking
By JOHN BIGGS

“All terrain” is not usually a designation associated with things as delicate as hard drives and high-speed memory chips. Dell, however, is betting that its Latitude ATG D620 − the ATG stands for All-Terrain Grade − can change that. The ATG D620, which Dell says is designed to military specifications, includes a spill-resistant keyboard, heavy-duty case and 14-inch screen, which is visible in direct sunlight. It weighs about 6 pounds with the optical disk drive and battery installed, and is about 2 inches thick. The laptop comes in a metal-and-black finish with protective coverings on its serial, video out, modem, Ethernet and four U.S.B. ports. Inside the hard shell is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, running at up to 2 gigahertz, and up to 4 gigabytes of memory. The least expensive model ($2,499) runs at 1.6 gigahertz and includes an 80-gigabyte drive and 512 megabytes of memory. Dell includes a fingerprint scanner for security, while military and other security-conscious users can enable the laptop’s built-in Smart Card reader and other data encryption technology. ...... it won’t survive a dunk in the deep, the ATG D620 can survive a splash of mud or a good, hard drop. (Adapted from The New York Times, January 25, 2007)

Model copes with chaos to deliver relief Computer program helps responders transport supplies in tough conditions
By Rachel Ehrenberg Science News, Web edition: Monday, February 21st, 2011
WASHINGTON — Getting blood or other perishable supplies to an area that’s been struck by an earthquake or hurricane isn’t as simple as asking what brown can do for you. But a new model quickly determines the best routes and means for delivering humanitarian aid, even in situations where bridges are out or airport tarmacs are clogged with planes.
The research, presented February 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, could help get supplies to areas which have experienced natural disasters or help prepare for efficient distribution of vaccines when the flu hits.
Efficient supply chains have long been a goal of manufacturers, but transport in fragile networks — where supply, demand and delivery routes may be in extremely rapid flux — requires a different approach, said Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who presented the new work. Rather than considering the shortest path from one place to another to maximize profit, her system aims for the cleanest path at minimum cost, while capturing factors such as the perishability of the product and the uncertainty of supply routes. ‘You don’t know where demand is, so it’s tricky,’ said Nagurney. ‘It’s a multicriteria decision-making problem.’
By calculating the total cost associated with each link in a network, accounting for congestion and incorporating penalties for time and products that are lost, the computer model calculates the best supply chain in situations where standard routes may be disrupted.
‘Mathematical tools are essential to develop formal means to predict, and to respond to, such critical perturbations,’ said Iain Couzin of Princeton University, who uses similar computational tools to study collective animal behavior. ‘This is particularly important where response must be rapid and effective, such as during disaster scenarios … or during epidemics or breaches of national security.
’ The work can be applied to immediate, pressing situations, such as getting blood, food or medication to a disaster site, or to longer-term problems such as determining the best locations for manufacturing flu vaccines. . Retrieved April 7th, 2011.