Questões de Concurso

   World Heritage Sites are locations deemed to be of cultural or historical benefit for humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). By including sites on its World Heritage list, UNESCO hopes to ensure their continued preservation.

    The criteria for inclusion in the list cover a range of possible categories: 

• Many World Heritage Sites are locations that have played a major role in the world’s cultures or civilizations. Some of them may in fact be the last remnants of a people who have since disappeared.

• UNESCO also celebrates sites that represent key periods in human history, such as innovations in town planning or technological breakthroughs.

• Places may be included as examples of individual genius. This may be a building of prime architectural importance or a location connected with the creation of a major work of art.

• Not all sites are man-made, however. They could be an area of outstanding natural beauty, or geological significance, for example, as the site of a fossil discovery.

• One further objective is to celebrate biodiversity. A site may play a vital role in the development of an existing ecosystem. Those which provide habitats for endangered species are particularly strong candidates for inclusion in the UNESCO list. 

   Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, based on a standard cathode ray tube, but the information stored in it was volatile in that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of nonvolatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. 

Information Technology. Internet: <en.wikipedia.org> (adapted).