Questões de Vestibular Sobre adjetivos | adjectives em inglês

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Ano: 2017 Banca: VUNESP Órgão: FAMERP Prova: VUNESP - 2017 - FAMERP - Conhecimentos Gerais |
Q1335936 Inglês

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Can plants hear?
Flora may be able to detect the sounds of flowing water or munching insects

    Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.
    In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y. One arm of each pot was placed in either a tray of water or a coiled plastic tube through which water flowed; the other arm had dry soil. The roots grew toward the arm of the pipe with the fluid, regardless of whether it was easily accessible or hidden inside the tubing. “They just knew the water was there, even if the only thing to detect was the sound of it flowing inside the pipe,” Gagliano says. Yet when the seedlings were given a choice between the water tube and some moistened soil, their roots favored the latter. She hypothesizes that these plants use sound waves to detect water at a distance but follow moisture gradients to home in on their target when it is closer.
    The research, reported earlier this year in Oecologia, is not the first to suggest flora can detect and interpret sounds. A 2014 study showed the rock cress Arabidopsis can distinguish between caterpillar chewing sounds and wind vibrations – the plant produced more chemical toxins after “hearing” a recording of feeding insects. “We tend to underestimate plants because their responses are usually less visible to us. But leaves turn out to be extremely sensitive vibration detectors,” says lead study author Heidi M. Appel, an environmental scientist now at the University of Toledo.
(Marta Zaraska. www.scientificamerican.com, 17.05.2017.)
No trecho do terceiro parágrafo “The research, reported earlier”, o termo em destaque indica
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Ano: 2019 Banca: UNIOESTE Órgão: UNIOESTE Prova: UNIOESTE - 2019 - UNIOESTE - Vestibular - Inglês |
Q1303659 Inglês

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Adapted from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7399879/European-capital-cities-dominate-list-worlds-FASTEST-public-transport-systems.html Last access: August, 29, 2019.

Qual alternativa abaixo contém um exemplo do uso do superlativo?
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Ano: 2019 Banca: UEG Órgão: UEG Prova: UEG - 2019 - UEG - Vestibular - Medicina - Inglês |
Q1300891 Inglês

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Artificial intelligence and the future of medicine

Washington University researchers are working to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems for health care, which have the potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, helping to ensure that patients get the right treatment at the right time.
In health care, artificial intelligence relies on the power of computers to sift through and make sense of reams of electronic data about patients—such as their ages, medical histories, health status, test results, medical images, DNA sequences, and many other sources of health information. AI excels at the complex identification of patterns in these reams of data, and it can do this at a scale and speed beyond human capacity. The hope is that this technology can be harnessed to help doctors and patients make better health-care decisions.


Where are the first places we will start to see AI entering medical practice?

One of the first applications of AI in patient care that we currently see is in imaging, to help improve the diagnosis of cancer or heart problems, for example. There are many types of imaging tests —X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and echocardiograms. But the underlying commonality in all those imaging methods is huge amounts of high-quality data. For AI to work well, it's best to have very complete data sets—no missing numbers, so to speak—and digital images provide that. Plus, the human eye is often blind to some of the patterns that could be present in these images—subtle changes in breast tissue over several years of mammograms, for example. There has been some interesting work done in recognizing early patterns of cancer or early patterns of heart failure that even a highly trained physician would not see.
In many ways, we already have very simple forms of AI in the clinic now. We've had tools for a long time that identify abnormal rhythms in an EKG, for example. An abnormal heartbeat pattern triggers an alert to draw a clinician's attention. This is a computer trying to replicate a human being understanding that data and saying, "This doesn't look normal, you may need to address this problem." Now, we have the capacity to analyze much larger and more complex sources of data, such as the entire electronic health record and perhaps even data pulled from daily life, as more people track their sleep patterns or pulse rates with wearable devices, for example.


What effect will this have on how doctors practice medicine?

It's important to emphasize that these tools are never going to replace clinicians. These technologies will provide assistance, helping care providers see important signals in massive amounts of data that would otherwise remain hidden. But at the same time, there are levels of understanding that computers still can't and may never replicate. To take a treatment recommendation from an AI, even an excellent recommendation, and decide if it's right for the patient is inherently a human decision-making process. What are the patient's preferences? What are the patient's values? What does this mean for the patient's life and for his or her family? That's never going to be an AI function. As these AI systems slowly emerge, we may start to see the roles of physicians changing—in my opinion, in better ways. Doctors' roles may shift from being data collectors and analyzers to being interpreters and councilors for patients as they try to navigate their health. 
Right now, the challenges we need to address as we try to bring AI into medical practice include improving the quality of the data that we feed into AI systems, developing ways to evaluate whether an AI system is actually better than standard of care, ensuring patient privacy and making sure not only that AI doesn't disrupt clinical work flow but in fact improves it. But if doctors do their jobs right and build these systems well, much of what we have described will become so ingrained in the system, people won't even refer to it separately as informatics or AI. It will just be medicine. 

Disponível em: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-artificial-intelligence-future-medicine.html. Acesso em: 02 maio 2019.
Analisando-se os aspectos linguísticos e estruturais do texto, constata-se que
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Ano: 2014 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2014 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1285439 Inglês
     Brazil plowed billions of dollars into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the longdelayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new public buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were abandoned right after being constructed. There was even an illfated U.F.O. museum built with federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit like a lost ship among the weeds.
     As Brazil sprints to get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run up against a catalog of delays, some caused by deadly construction accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It is building bus and rail systems for spectators that will not be finished until long after the games are done. But the World Cup projects are just a part of a bigger national problem casting a pall over Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish projects conceived when economic growth was surging that now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget. 
    Some economists say the troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy, irresponsible allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.
    Huge street protests have been aimed at costly new stadiums being built in cities like Manaus and Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats after the World Cup events are finished, adding to concerns that even more white elephants will emerge from the tournament. 
   “The fiascos are multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas, a Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re waking up to the reality that immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our streets.” 
     The growing list of troubled development projects includes a $3.4 billion network of concrete canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of northeast Brazil — which was supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well as dozens of new wind farms idled by a lack of transmission lines and unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de Janeiro’s skyline.
     Economists surveyed by the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy growing just 1.63 percent this year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010, making 2014 the fourth straight year of slow growth. 
     President Dilma Rousseff’s supporters contend that the public spending has worked, helping to keep unemployment at historical lows and preventing what would have been a much worse economic slowdown had the government not pumped its considerable resources into infrastructure development.
    Still, a growing chorus of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure projects reveals weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism. First, they say, Brazil gives extraordinary influence to a web of state-controlled companies, banks and pension funds to invest in ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the vast public bureaucracy cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.
     “Some ventures never deserved public money in the first place,” said Sérgio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, pointing to the millions in state financing for the overhaul of the Glória hotel in Rio, owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike Batista. The project was left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup, when Mr. Batista’s business empire crumbled last year. “For infrastructure projects which deserve state support and get it,” Mr. Lazzarini continued, “there’s the daunting task of dealing with the risks that the state itself creates.” 
     The Transnordestina, a railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast Brazil, illustrates some of the pitfalls plaguing projects big and small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a cost of about $1.8 billion, the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000 miles, is now expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from state banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016. But with work sites abandoned because of audits and other setbacks months ago in and around Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s poorest states, even that timeline seems optimistic. Long stretches where freight trains were already supposed to be running stand deserted. Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the shadow of ghostly railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys. “Thieves are pillaging metal from the work sites,” said Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician who labored with thousands of others before work halted last year. “Now there are just these bridges left in the middle of nowhere.” 
     Brazil’s transportation minister, César Borges, expressed exasperation with the delays in finishing the railroad, which is needed to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the bureaucracies that delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court of Accounts; the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped slaves; and the Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors. Still, Mr. Borges insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just Brazil.”
    Some economists contend that the way Brazil is investing may be hampering growth instead of supporting it. The authorities encouraged energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot operate because they lack transmission lines to connect to the electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers worry over potential electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams run dry amid a drought.
     Then there is the extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in southeast Brazil where residents claimed to have seen an alien in 1996. Officials secured federal money to build the museum, but now all that remains of the unfinished project is the rusting carcass of what looks like a flying saucer. “That museum,” said Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of São Paulo, “is an insult to both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial beings like ourselves who foot the bill for yet another project failing to deliver.”

Adapted from www.nytimes.com/April 12, 2014.
The –ING words in “withering criticism”, “wasteful spending” and “daunting task” are, respectively,
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Ano: 2014 Banca: UNEB Órgão: UNEB Prova: UNEB - 2014 - UNEB - Vestibular - Português/Inglês/Ciências |
Q1284513 Inglês

SCHULZ, Peanuts. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 15 nov. 2014.

Snoopy describes himself as a __________ dog.


The alternative that suitably completes this blank is

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Ano: 2014 Banca: UNEB Órgão: UNEB Prova: UNEB - 2014 - UNEB - Vestibular - Português/Inglês/Ciências |
Q1284511 Inglês
The adjective “worst” (l. 3) is the superlative degree of
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Ano: 2019 Banca: UNIVESP Órgão: UNIVESP Prova: UNIVESP - 2019 - UNIVESP - Vestibular 1º semestre |
Q1280806 Inglês
Utilize o texto a seguir para responder a questão.

NO DIFFERENCE

Small as a peanut,
Big as a giant,
We’re all the same size
When we turn off the light.

Rich as a sultan,
Poor as a mite,
We’re all worth the same
When we turn off the light.

Red, black or orange,
Yellow or white,
We all look the same
When we turn off the light

So maybe the way
To make everything right
Is for God just reach out
And turn off the light!

(Where the Sidewalk Ends, the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1974)
De acordo com o texto, assinale a alternativa incorreta na oposição de adjetivos.
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Ano: 2016 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2016 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa 2ª fase |
Q1280563 Inglês
The -ING words in “efficient killing machines” (line 59) and “voice to such suffering” (lines 67-68) respectively function as
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Ano: 2019 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2019 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa 2ªfase |
Q1280301 Inglês

TEXTO

The Future Of Work: 5 Important Ways Jobs

Will Change In The 4th Industrial Revolution


Fonte:

https://www.forbes.com/2019/07/15

The text includes the ing-words “learning” (line 06), “transforming” (line 08), “unnerving” (line 09), “working” (line 60), and “thinking” (line 110) whose grammatical functions are respectively
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Ano: 2013 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 2ª fase |
Q1279898 Inglês
TEXT

     BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations.
     In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug. 
      In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”
     “I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.” 
     His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination. 
   The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education. 
     In another move, Mr. Barbosa used his sway as chief justice and president of the panel overseeing Brazil’s judiciary to effectively legalize same-sex marriage across the country. And in an anticorruption crusade, he is overseeing the precedent-setting trial of senior political figures in the governing Workers Party for their roles in a vast vote-buying scheme.
   Ascending to Brazil’s high court, much less pushing the institution to assert its independence, long seemed out of reach for Mr. Barbosa, the eldest of eight children raised in Paracatu, an impoverished city in Minas Gerais State, where his father worked as a bricklayer.  
    But his prominence — not just on the court, but in the streets as well — is so well established that masks with his face were sold for Carnival, amateur musicians have composed songs about his handling of the corruption trial and posted them on YouTube, and demonstrators during the huge street protests that shook the nation this year told pollsters that Mr. Barbosa was one of their top choices for president in next year’s elections.
     While the protests have subsided since their height in June, the political tumult they set off persists. The race for president, once considered a shoo-in for the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, is now up in the air, with Mr. Barbosa — who is now so much in the public eye that gossip columnists are following his romance with a woman in her 20s — repeatedly saying he will not run. “I’m not a candidate for anything,” he says. 
     But the same public glare that has turned him into a celebrity has singed him as well. While he has won widespread admiration for his guidance of the high court, Mr. Barbosa, like almost every other prominent political figure in Brazil, has recently come under scrutiny. And for someone accustomed to criticizing the so-called supersalaries awarded to some members of Brazil’s legal system, the revelations have put Mr. Barbosa on the defensive. 
     One report in the Brazilian news media described how he received about $180,000 in payments for untaken leaves of absence during his 19 years as a public prosecutor. (Such payments are common in some areas of Brazil’s large public bureaucracy.) Another noted that he bought an apartment in Miami through a limited liability company, suggesting an effort to pay less taxes on the property. In statements, Mr. Barbosa contends that he has done nothing wrong. 
     In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance. 
     As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea. 
     Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris. 
   Fascinated by the legal systems of other countries, Mr. Barbosa wrote a book on affirmative action in the United States. He still voices his admiration for figures like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice in the United States, and William J. Brennan Jr., who for years embodied the court’s liberal vision, clearly drawing inspiration from them as he pushed Brazil’s high court toward socially liberal rulings.
    Still, no decision has thrust Mr. Barbosa into Brazil’s public imagination as much as his handling of the trial of political operatives, legislators and bankers found guilty in a labyrinthine corruption scandal called the mensalão, or big monthly allowance, after the regular payments made to lawmakers in exchange for their votes. 
    Last November, at Mr. Barbosa’s urging, the high court sentenced some of the most powerful figures in the governing Workers Party to years in prison for their crimes in the scheme, including bribery and unlawful conspiracy, jolting a political system in which impunity for politicians has been the norm.  
     Now the mensalão trial is entering what could be its final phases, and Mr. Barbosa has at times been visibly exasperated that defendants who have already been found guilty and sentenced have managed to avoid hard jail time. He has clashed with other justices over their consideration of a rare legal procedure in which appeals over close votes at the high court are examined. 
     Losing his patience with one prominent justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, who tried to absolve some defendants of certain crimes, Mr. Barbosa publicly accused him this month of “chicanery” by using legalese to prop up certain positions. An outcry ensued among some who could not stomach Mr. Barbosa’s talking to a fellow justice like that. “Who does Justice Joaquim Barbosa think he is?” asked Ricardo Noblat, a columnist for the newspaper O Globo, questioning whether Mr. Barbosa was qualified to preside over the court. “What powers does he think he has just because he’s sitting in the chair of the chief justice of the Supreme Federal Tribunal?” 
      Mr. Barbosa did not apologize. In the interview, he said some tension was necessary for the court to function properly. “It was always like this,” he said, contending that arguments are now just easier to see because the court’s proceedings are televised. 
     Linking the court’s work to the recent wave of protests, he explained that he strongly disagreed with the violence of some demonstrators, but he also said he believed that the street movements were “a sign of democracy’s exuberance.” 
     “People don’t want to passively stand by and observe these arrangements of the elite, which were always the Brazilian tradition,” he said. 
In the phrases “his condescending tone,” “contending that arguments,” and “the court’s proceedings,” the –ING words function, respectively, as:
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Ano: 2015 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2015 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa |
Q1279282 Inglês
The ING words: increasing (line 19), rating (line 44), polling (line 47) are respectively
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Ano: 2014 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2014 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa |
Q1279030 Inglês

TEXT

    Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator. But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time for babies? It is a question that parents, pediatricians and researchers are struggling to answer as children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate to digital media.

   

     For years, child development experts have advised parents to read to their children early and often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and social benefits. In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at every visit that they should read to their children from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as vaccines and vegetables.

   

     On the other hand, the academy strongly recommends no screen time for children under 2, and less than two hours a day for older children. 

   

     At a time when reading increasingly means swiping pages on a device, and app stores are bursting with reading programs and learning games aimed at infants and preschoolers, which bit of guidance should parents heed? 

   

     The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. “We know how children learn to read,” said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “But we don’t know how that process will be affected by digital technology.” 

   

     Part of the problem is the newness of the devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in widespread use long enough for the sorts of extended studies that will reveal their effects on learning.

   

     Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote the June policy for the pediatrics group, said electronic books were intentionally not addressed. “We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy statement on the issue of reading starting at a very young age,” she said. “And there isn’t any data, really, on e-books.”

   

    But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development. “There’s a lot of interaction when you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”

   

     In a 2013 study, researchers found that children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic device spent more time focusing on the device itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at least two other studies).

 

     “Parents were literally putting their hands over the kids’ hands and saying, ‘Wait, don’t press the button yet. Finish this up first,’ ” said Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead author of the 2013 study that was conducted at Temple University. Parents who used conventional books were more likely to engage in what education researchers call “dialogic reading,” the sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and its relation to the child’s life that research has shown are key to a child’s linguistic development.

   

     Complicating matters is that fewer and fewer children’s e-books can strictly be described as books, say researchers. As technology evolves, publishers are adding bells and whistles that encourage detours. “What we’re really after in reading to our children is behavior that sparks a conversation,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013 study. “But if that book has things that disrupt the conversation, like a game plopped right in the middle of the story, then it’s not offering you the same advantages as an old-fashioned book.”

   

     Of course, e-book publishers and app developers point to interactivity as an educational advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells and whistles — Clifford’s bark, the sleepy narration of “Goodnight Moon,” the appearance of the word “ham” when a child taps the ham in the Green Eggs and Ham app — help the child pick up language, they say.

   

     There is some evidence to bear out those claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an interactive app as opposed to one that required no action.

   

     But when it comes to learning language, researchers say, no piece of technology can substitute for a live instructor — even if the child appears to be paying close attention.

 

     Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared a group of 9-month-old babies who were addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only to English.

 

    “The way the kids were staring at the screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better from the DVDs,” she said. But brain scans and language testing revealed that the DVD group “learned absolutely nothing,” Dr. Kuhl said. “Their brain measures looked just like the control group that had just been exposed to English. 

   

     The only group that learned was the live social interaction group.” In other words, “it’s being talked with, not being talked at,” that teaches children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said. 

   

     Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed by e-books that read themselves to children, or engage them with games, is that they could lull parents into abdicating their educational responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

 

    “There’s the possibility for e-books to become the TV babysitters of this generation,” he said. “We don’t want parents to say, ‘There’s no reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my child how to read the word, because my iPad can do it.’ ” 

   

     But parents may find it difficult to avoid resorting to tablets. Even literacy advocates say the guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing limited screen time is not high on the list of parental missteps. “You might have an infant and think you’re down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you don’t want your baby in front of a screen, but then you have a grandparent on Skype,” Mr. Snow said. “Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe it’s not the world’s worst thing.” 

   

     “The issue is when you’re in the other room and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it,” he said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note that there is an emotional component to paper-andink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend to their electronic counterparts, however engaging. 

From: www.nytimes.com, OCT. 11, 2014 

The word READING in the sentences “At a time when reading increasingly means swiping pages on a device (...), But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device (...), and (...) whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension (...)” functions, respectively, as
Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2012 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa - 1º Dia - 2ª fase |
Q1278815 Inglês
T E X T 

    SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. 

     This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. 
    They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. 
    Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle MartinRhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. 
    In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task. 
    The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
    Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
    The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of PompeuFabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. 
    The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). 
    In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not. 
    Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
    Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint? 

Source: www.nytimes.com

In the following question, some sentences from the text have been modified to fit certain grammatical structures. 
The functions of the words improving, understanding, blessing, conflicting and performing in the text are respectively
Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2012 - UECE - Vestibular - Língua Inglesa |
Q1277452 Inglês

TEXT


The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.

Going back to school for months or years is not realistic for many workers, who are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence. In their quest to occupy a useful niche, they are turning to bite-size instructional videos, peer-to-peer forums and virtual college courses.

Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at the London Business School, has coined a term for this necessity: “serial mastery.”

“You can’t expect that what you’ve become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s,” she said, adding that workers must try to choose specialties that cannot be outsourced or automated. “Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.”

Businesses have responded by pouring more money into training, even in the current economic doldrums, according to several measures. They have experimented by paying employees to share their expertise in internal social networks, creating video games that teach and, human resources consultants say, enticing employees with tuition help even if they leave the company.

Individuals have also shouldered a lot of responsibility for their own upgrades. Lynda.com, which charges $25 a month for access to training videos on topics like the latest version of Photoshop, says its base of individual customers has been growing 42 percent a year since 2008. Online universities like Udacity and Coursera are on pace to double in size in a year, according to Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in learning and talent management. The number of doctors participating in continuing education programs has more than doubled in the last decade, with the vast majority of the growth stemming from the increased popularity of Internet-based activities, according to the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education in Chicago.

The struggle is not just to keep up, but to anticipate a future of rapid change. When the AshevilleBuncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina wanted to start a program for developing smartphone and tablet apps, the faculty had to consider the name carefully. “We had this title Mobile Applications, and then we realized that it may not be apps in two years, it may be something else,” said Pamela Silvers, the chairwoman of the business computer technologies department. “So we changed it to Mobile Development.”

As the metadata and digital archivist at Emory University, Elizabeth Russey Roke, 35, has had to keep up with evolving standards that help different databases share information, learn how to archive “born digital” materials, and use computers to bring literary and social connections among different collections to life. The bulk of her learning has been on the job, supplemented by the occasional course or videos on Lynda.com.

“For me, it’s easier to learn something in the classroom than it is on my own,” she said. “But I can’t exactly afford another three years of library school.”

Rapid change is a challenge for traditional universities; textbooks and even journals often lag too far behind the curve to be of help, said Kunal Mehta, a Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Stanford University. His field is so new, and changing so rapidly, he said, that there is little consensus on established practices or necessary skills. “It’s more difficult to know what we should learn,” he said. “We have advisers that we work with, but a lot of times they don’t know any better than us what’s going to happen in the future.” 

Instead, Mr. Mehta, 26, spends a lot of time comparing notes with others in his field, just as many professionals turn to their peers to help them stay current. The International Automotive Technicians Network, where mechanics pay $15 a month to trade tips on repairs, has more than 75,000 active users today, up from 48,000 in 2006, said Scott Brown, the president. 

In an economy where new, specialized knowledge is worth so much, it may seem anticompetitive to share expertise. But many professionals say they don’t see it that way. 

“We’re scattered all over the country, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., so it never really bothered us that we were sharing the secrets of what we do,” said Bill Moss, whose repair shop in Warrenton, Va., specializes in European cars, and who is a frequent user of peer-to-peer forums. 

Mr. Moss, 55, said technological advances and proprietary diagnostic tools had forced many garages to specialize. Ten years ago, if his business had hit a slow patch, he said, he would have been quicker to broaden his repertory. “I might have looked at other brands and said, ‘These cars aren’t so bad.’ That’s much harder to do now, based on technology and equipment requirements.” His training budget is about $4,000 a year for each repair technician. 

Learning curves are not always driven by technology. Managers have to deal with different cultures, different time zones and different generations as well as changing attitudes. As medical director of the Reproductive Science Center of New England, Dr. Samuel C. Pang has used patient focus groups and sensitivity training to help the staff adjust to treating lesbian couples, gay male couples, and transgendered couples who want to have children. This has given the clinic a competitive advantage. 

“We have had several male couples and lesbian couples come to our program from our competitors’ program because they said they didn’t feel comfortable there,” Dr. Pang said. 

On top of that, he has to master constantly evolving technology. “The amount of information that I learned in medical school is minuscule,” he said, “compared to what is out there now.” 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22

In questions, sentences from the text may have been modified/adapted to fit certain grammatical structures.


In the text, the function of the words retooling, turning, training, consulting, and stemming is respectively

Alternativas
Q1275785 Inglês

TEXT C

(The Economist, May 22nd, 2010)

Which of the following words functions as an adjective in text C?
Alternativas
Ano: 2017 Banca: IF-RS Órgão: IF-RS Prova: IF-RS - 2017 - IF-RS - Vestibular - Segundo Semestre |
Q1275032 Inglês

INSTRUÇÃO: a questão deve ser respondida com base no texto a seguir. 

Adapted from:< http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/consumerism-and-its-antisocial-effects-can-beturned-onor-off.html> and < http://grist.org/living/consumerism-plays-a-huge-role-in-climate-change/>Acessed on September 1st, 2016.

Considerando as informações dadas no texto e as regras gramaticais para a formação dos graus comparativo e superlativo dos adjetivos em inglês, escolha a alternativa correta.
Alternativas
Ano: 2016 Banca: IF-RR Órgão: IF-RR Prova: IF-RR - 2016 - IF-RR - Vestibular - Primeiro Semestre |
Q1274278 Inglês
Facebook and Google Are Going To War Against Hate Speech
Offending posts will be deleted within 24 hours

   Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft have agreed to work with European officials to crack down on hateful speech published on their respective platforms. Each company has agreed to review potentially problematic posts and remove offending content within 24 hours. 
   “The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech,” Vĕra Jourová, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, said in a joint statement from the European Commission and the participating companies. “Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalize young people and racist use to spread violence and hatred.”
     The new partnership comes after Facebook, Twitter, and Google agreed to erase hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours in Germany, an attempt to address racism following the refugee crisis. That agreement, which Reuters reported last year, also made it easier for individual users to report hateful speech.
     Under the new code of conduct, technology companies will have clear rules in place for reviewing content that may be deemed malicious or hateful. The document also says the companies should be responsible for educating their users on the types of content that are disallowed.
      Tech companies assure that the recently announced code of conduct won’t interfere with freedom of speech. “We remain committed to letting the Tweets flow,” Karen White, Twitter’s head of public policy for Europe, said in the statement. “However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”
(Time Magazine, May 31, 2016)

Glossary: hate speech – discurso de ódio; to agree: concordar; to erase: apagar; partnership – parceria. 
As palavras “potentially” e “offending”, ambas na quinta e sexta linhas do texto, são, respectivamente:
Alternativas
Ano: 2010 Banca: IFG Órgão: IF-GO Prova: IFG - 2010 - IF-GO - Vestibular - Prova 2 |
Q1273626 Inglês
The Wind
James Stephens

The wind stood up, and gave a shout:
He whistled on his fingers, and

Kicked the withered leaves about,
And thumped the branches with his hand,

And said he'd kill, and kill, and kill:
And so he will! And so he will! 

The words in “The Wind” that give human qualities to the wind are:
Alternativas
Ano: 2010 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2010 - UECE - Vestibular - Segunda Fase - Redação e Inglês |
Q1273365 Inglês
According to their function in the text, the words frightening (line 52), beginning (line 62), everlasting (line 69), experimenting (line 137) and suffering (line 79) are classified as
Alternativas
Ano: 2011 Banca: UFGD Órgão: UFGD Prova: UFGD - 2011 - UFGD - Vestibular - Prova 1 |
Q1265629 Inglês
Read the New York Times article and answer question.

Eating Disorders a New Front in Insurance Fight
By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: October 13, 2011

     People with eating disorders like anorexia have opened up a new battleground in the insurance wars, testing the boundaries of laws mandating equivalent coverage for mental illnesses. 
     Through claims and court cases, those with severe cases of anorexia or bulimia are fighting insurers to pay for stays in residential treatment centers, arguing that the centers offer around-the-clock monitoring so that patients do not forgo eating or purge their meals.
     But in the last few years, some insurance companies have re-emphasized that they do not cover residential treatment for eating disorders or other mental or emotional conditions. The insurers consider residential treatments not only costly — sometimes reaching more than $1,000 a day — but unproven and more akin to education than to medicine. Even some doctors who treat eating disorders concede there are few studies proving that residential care is effective, although they believe it has value. 

(Disponível em: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/business/ruling-offers-hope-to-eating-disorder-sufferers.html?hp>. Acesso em: 5 out. 2011).
Which is the best option to replace the adjective „akin to‟ in the article?
Alternativas
Respostas
41: D
42: B
43: A
44: B
45: A
46: B
47: D
48: B
49: C
50: B
51: D
52: C
53: B
54: B
55: D
56: E
57: E
58: C
59: D
60: D