Questões de Vestibular Sobre adjetivos | adjectives em inglês

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Ano: 2013 Banca: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie Órgão: MACKENZIE Prova: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie - 2013 - MACKENZIE - vestibular |
Q1347200 Inglês


Behind the Meaning of the Pope’s Names
The new pope’s choice of ‘Francis’ hints at the direction of his reign.
    Enter Pope Francis. The first Jesuit pope. The first from Latin America. It is, indeed, a historic moment for the papacy. Those who waited for a leader from the new Catholic world will no doubt be __( I )__ by the choice, but his new status as the leader of a global church requires a different persona and a new mode of action. The new pope speaks not only for Argentina, Latin America, and the Jesuits, but also for the entire Roman Catholic world.


The first Jesuit pope. The first from Latin America. (Enrique Marcarian/Reuters)

    It is precisely for this reason that cardinals shed their names along with their brightly __( II )__ vestments. Historically, the tradition of selecting a new papal name dates back to the sixth century, when Pope John II swapped his awkwardly __( III )__ name Mercurius for the solidly Christian John. At the same time the selection of religious names is more than an opportunity to symbolically cast aside individual identity. Papal names chart a course for the future by summoning up the past. The new pope assumes either the mantle of religious heroes and leaders from days gone by or the virtues of the Innocents and the Piuses. The selection of the name both forges a new identity and signals how the pope wishes to be seen and remembered. It is, in essence, not only the answer to the __( IV )__ question “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” but also a way of preemptively writing one’s own reviews.
    Traditionally popes have been __( V )__ of reaching too high, of appearing too self-congratulatory. The office of the pope is built, literally and metaphorically, on the legacy of St. Peter, the apostle of Christ, whose remains lie beneath the papal seat in the Vatican. But there has been no Pope Peter II. Thus far, no pope has had the audacity to present himself as standing in continuity with the favored disciple of Jesus. Nor would Pope Francis have been able to select the name of the founder of his own order. A Pope Ignatius—after Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola—would have appeared self-serving.
    At first blush, Pope Francis’s selection of a previously __( VI )__ papal name—he is no 23rd anything—marks a break with the past and augurs well for those looking for a move away from deeply entrenched institutionalism. The new pope symbolically clears the deck for a new period of Catholic history. For a church desperately in need of an administrative makeover, it creates a nominally blank slate for the pale-garbed pontiff.
Newsweek

The adjectives that properly fill in blanks I, II, III, IV, V and VI, in the text, are
Alternativas
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: 2013 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Inglês - 1º Dia |
Q1261834 Inglês
TEXT
   
   HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by most accounts this hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia. 
   The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions. 
     In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates. In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics.
      Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”
      Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.
     Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.
     “This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”
  Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.
      Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.
    With the sheer volume, variety and speed of data today, as well as developing technologies, programs are more than a repackaging of existing courses. “Data science is emerging as an academic discipline, defined not by a mere amalgamation of interdisciplinary fields but as a body of knowledge, a set of professional practices, a professional organization and a set of ethical responsibilities,” said Christopher Starr, chairman of the computer science department at the College of Charleston, one of a few institutions offering data science at the undergraduate level.
     Most master’s degree programs in data science require basic programming skills. They start with what Ms. Schutt describes as the “boring” part — scraping and cleaning raw data and “getting it into a nice table where you can actually analyze it.” Many use data sets provided by businesses or government, and pass back their results. Some host competitions to see which student can come up with the best solution to a company’s problem.
     Studying a Web user’s data has privacy implications. Using data to decide someone’s eligibility for a line of credit or health insurance, or even recommending who they friend on Facebook, can affect their lives. “We’re building these models that have impact on human life,” Ms. Schutt said. “How can we do that carefully?” Ethics classes address these questions.
       Finally, students have to learn to communicate their findings, visually and orally, and they need business know-how, perhaps to develop new products.

From: www.nytimes.com
In the sentences “…this is an academic interest with real-world applications,said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering.” and “This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them.”, one finds adjective clauses that are respectively
Alternativas
Ano: 2013 Banca: UECE-CEV Órgão: UECE Prova: UECE-CEV - 2013 - UECE - Vestibular - Inglês - 1º Dia |
Q1261830 Inglês
TEXT
   
   HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by most accounts this hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia. 
   The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions. 
     In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates. In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics.
      Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”
      Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.
     Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.
     “This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”
  Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.
      Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.
    With the sheer volume, variety and speed of data today, as well as developing technologies, programs are more than a repackaging of existing courses. “Data science is emerging as an academic discipline, defined not by a mere amalgamation of interdisciplinary fields but as a body of knowledge, a set of professional practices, a professional organization and a set of ethical responsibilities,” said Christopher Starr, chairman of the computer science department at the College of Charleston, one of a few institutions offering data science at the undergraduate level.
     Most master’s degree programs in data science require basic programming skills. They start with what Ms. Schutt describes as the “boring” part — scraping and cleaning raw data and “getting it into a nice table where you can actually analyze it.” Many use data sets provided by businesses or government, and pass back their results. Some host competitions to see which student can come up with the best solution to a company’s problem.
     Studying a Web user’s data has privacy implications. Using data to decide someone’s eligibility for a line of credit or health insurance, or even recommending who they friend on Facebook, can affect their lives. “We’re building these models that have impact on human life,” Ms. Schutt said. “How can we do that carefully?” Ethics classes address these questions.
       Finally, students have to learn to communicate their findings, visually and orally, and they need business know-how, perhaps to develop new products.

From: www.nytimes.com
The functions of the words purchasing, dealing, filings, programming and recommending in the text are respectively
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Ano: 2013 Banca: SENAC-SP Órgão: SENAC-SP Prova: SENAC-SP - 2013 - SENAC-SP - Vestibular - Inglês |
Q524689 Inglês
Atenção: A  questão refere-se ao texto apresentado abaixo.

The stories behind the black opera stars of 'I Live to Sing'
Washington Post − Saturday, August 24, 2013

Julie Cohen and Kamal Khan met in elementary school in Fairfax County about 40 years  . Today, Cohen, 49, is the Brooklyn-based founder of BetterThanFiction Productions, a documentary film company; Khan is the director of the University of Cape Town Opera School. “I Live to Sing," a feature-length documentary directed and produced by Cohen, focuses on three of Khan's black students who made their way from humble beginnings in often poverty-ridden townships to excel in opera ‒an art form most closely associated with white, elite audiences and performers.

How did you come to do this project?
It was just the fortuitous situation of knowing Kamal Khan. I met Kamal in third grade at Pine Ridge Elementary School in Fairfax County. He was unusual in that even at age 9 his prime interests seemed to be opera, classical music, Shakespeare. These are interests that when you're 40 and living in New York are not so strange! He became James Levine's assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and he still now does a lot of conducting internationally, although his home base is at the University of Cape Town. In the meantime I started doing several documentaries about the human side behind the performing arts. Knowing what Kamal was up to I realized that his fascinating work − from an artistic, political and social context − was just the sort of thing I was interested in making films about.

Why is it interesting to you to document performing artists?
We're all so steeped in the relatively small circle of people who become really famous or really big deals. But it's also, I think, wonderful to see the work of and hear the life stories of the majority of performing artists who are toiling away, many of whom are supremely talented, but the world doesn't necessarily get to know.

Tell me about Linda's life, the young soprano featured in your film.
Linda Nteleza comes from a huge township adjacent to Cape Town that has a lot of problems − poverty, health-care issues, education issues, huge unemployment. I believe it has the fastest-growing rate of tuberculosis in the world, and Linda has suffered from the consequences of that. Linda learned to sing in school and then followed by her work in community choir, and through the teachers and coaches learned about University of Cape Town and its music program. She lived only a half-hour from the university but hadn't been aware that music was something that was out there. She was encouraged to go and apply. I think she didn't expect to get it, but to her joy andnamazement she did.
When Linda told her mother that “I want to go to college to study opera," her mother's immediate response was, “What's opera?" It wasn't that she wasn't well-versed in the art form; she didn't know what it was. Linda herself had first heard opera in a TV commercial for Shell Oil that had a beautiful soprano opera singer as background music and she was completely entranced, like, “That's what I want to sing."
Were you an opera fan before this?
[Laughs] I . . . must . . . confess that I was not only not an opera fan, but really almost actively probably disliked opera before this project. That's actually not something that I mentioned to Kamal when I pitched the idea of “Can I follow your program around? Can I bring cameras to your school?" [Laughs] . . . But as often when you delve into different art forms, particularly classical art forms that you are ignorant of, the more you get to know it, the  it starts to sound.

(Adapted from http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/qanda-the-stories-behind-the-black-opera-stars-of-i-live-to sing/2013/08/23)
A palavra que, no contexto, preenche adequadamente a  lacunaImagem associada para resolução da questão é:
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Ano: 2013 Banca: UERJ Órgão: UERJ Prova: UERJ - 2013 - UERJ - Vestibular - Primeiro Exame |
Q339613 Inglês
Words and expressions such as older (title), live longer (l. 4), longevity (l. 8), older person (l. 34) and the elderly (l. 36) belong to the same semantic field. The elderly is translated as:

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Ano: 2012 Banca: UCPEL Órgão: UCPEL Prova: UCPEL - 2012 - UCPEL - Vestibular |
Q1359554 Inglês
A forma comparativa destacada na frase “More surprising is the finding that women tend to be more wealthy than men” (linha 33) poderia ser corretamente substituída por
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Ano: 2012 Banca: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie Órgão: MACKENZIE Prova: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie - 2012 - MACKENZIE - vestibular |
Q1343474 Inglês


Dude Is a Rock Star

Gustavo Dudamel is the Elvis of the orchestra world, and he has the sold-out concerts to prove it. Meet the L.A. Philharmonic conductor who’s bridging the generation gap – and saving classical music.
By Chris Lee

    Meet the maestro called the savior of classical music. “The Dude,” as he’s come to be known, is widely hailed as “the rock-star conductor,” the classical world’s answer to Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson. The __( I )__ conductor is a __( II )__ figure in symphonic music, whose cultural influence belies his relatively young 31 years. With his __( III )__ mane of corkscrew curls, ecstatic podium presence, and unabashedly __( IV )__ interpretations of __( V )__ orchestral works, Dudamel has unleashed a flood of new interest in classical music, bridging the generation gap between pension-age high-culture appreciators and younger listeners.
    And the show is just beginning. “The Mahler Project is immense,” says Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the L.A. Phil. “When we planned it, I don’t think the two of us completely took in how big it would turn out to be.” It is the kind of bar-raising command performance that audiences have come to expect from the Venezuelan wunderkind – a musician who, whether taking on a Sibelius violin concerto or a Strauss symphony, makes a policy of raising the roof whenever he performs.
    The grueling project also underscores Dudamel’s commitment to El Sistema – “The System” – Venezuela’s tough-love musical-outreach program for youth that made the conductor what he is and still counts him as its most forward face. “An orchestra is a model for an ideal global society – a symbol,” he says in his heavily accented English. “You have to create harmony. Everyone has to listen to each other, this large, complex group of people with different personalities that has to communicate. You have to have discipline. This is where The System works! The point is not to build better musicians. It’s to build better citizens, to see children building their lives from music.”
Newsweek
The adjectives that properly fill in blanks I, II, III, IV and V, in the text, are:
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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
Ano: 2012 Banca: VUNESP Órgão: UNIFESP Prova: VUNESP - 2012 - UNIFESP - Vestibular |
Q325347 Inglês
Instrução: Assinale as alternativas que completam, correta e respectivamente, as lacunas numeradas de 42 a 45 no texto.

Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: VUNESP Órgão: UNIFESP Prova: VUNESP - 2012 - UNIFESP - Vestibular |
Q325334 Inglês
An appropriate expression to describe Dr. Timothy Lepore would be

Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: PUC - RS Órgão: PUC - RS Prova: PUC - RS - 2012 - PUC - RS - Vestibular - Prova 02 |
Q278478 Inglês
The statements below are related to words used in the text. The only one which is NOT correct is
Alternativas
Ano: 2012 Banca: UNICENTRO Órgão: UNICENTRO Prova: UNICENTRO - 2012 - UNICENTRO - Vestibular - Inglês |
Q264534 Inglês
The only alternative in which there is not a pair of opposites is

Alternativas
Ano: 2011 Banca: UEFS Órgão: UEFS Prova: UEFS - 2011 - UEFS - Vestibular Segundo Semestre - Dia 1 - Inglês |
Q1365145 Inglês


EVANS, Stephen. Disponível em:  <www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/wordsinthenews/2011/05/110518_witn_electric_cars_page.shtml>. Acesso em: 2 jun. 2011.

The word “better” (l. 7) is the irregular comparative degree of
Alternativas
Q1355523 Inglês
Which of the following words functions as an adjective in text C?
Alternativas
Q1355514 Inglês
TEXT A


All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.
He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell,
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.

by Cecil F. Alexander
Which of the following groups of words from text A only refers to size:
Alternativas
Ano: 2011 Banca: UEM Órgão: UEM Prova: UEM - 2011 - UEM - Vestibular - PAS - Etapa 2 - Inglês |
Q1350080 Inglês

Texto

A brief history of Facebook


(Adapted from a text available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/techonolgy/2007/jul/25/media. newmedia. Accessed on 02/6/2011, at 9h10min) 

Assinale a alternativa correta considerando os elementos gramaticais do texto.


The words “Earlier” (line 46) and “largest” (line 44) are, respectively, the comparative and superlative of “early” and “large”.

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
Ano: 2011 Banca: PUC - RS Órgão: PUC - RS Prova: PUC - RS - 2011 - PUC - RS - Vestibular - Prova 02 |
Q344604 Inglês
A opção que indica possibilidade de substituição da palavra “random” (line 03), sem que o sentido do texto seja comprometido, é
Alternativas
Respostas
61: A
62: B
63: C
64: D
65: A
66: B
67: A
68: B
69: B
70: B
71: A
72: C
73: E
74: E
75: D
76: D
77: B
78: C
79: D
80: C