Questões de Vestibular Sobre interpretação de texto | reading comprehension em inglês

                                             FLORIDA HURRICANES

1 Before Hurricane Sandy tore through New York and New Jersey, it stopped in Florida. Huge waves covered beaches, swept over Fort Lauderdale's concrete sea wall and spilled onto A1A, Florida's coastal highway. A month later another series of violent storms hit south Florida, severely eroding Fort Lauderdale's beaches and a section of A1A. Workers are building a new sea wall, mending the highway and adding a couple of pedestrian bridges. Beach erosion forced Fort Lauderdale to buy sand from an inland mine in central Florida; the mine's soft, white sand stands out against the darker, grittier native variety.

2 Hurricanes and storms are nothing new for Florida. But as the oceans warm, hurricanes are growing more intense. To make matters worse, this is happening against a backdrop of sharply rising sea levels, turning what has been a seasonal annoyance into an existential threat.

3 For around 2,000 years sea levels remained relatively constant. Between 1880 and 2011, however, they rose by an average of 0.07 inches (1.8mm) a year, and between 1993 and 2011 the average was between 0.11 and 0.13 inches a year. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that seas could rise by as much as 23 inches by 2100, though since then many scientists have called that forecast conservative. Seas are also expected to warm up, which may make hurricanes and tropical storms more intense.

4 Even as seas have risen over the past century, Americans have rushed to build homes near the beach. Storms that lash the modern American coastline cause more economic damage than their predecessors because there is more to destroy. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, a Category 4 storm, caused $1 billion-worth of damage in current dollars. Were it to strike today the insured losses would be $125 billion, reckons Air Worldwide, a catastrophe-modelling firm. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, caused $23 billion in damage; today it would be twice that

5 Most Floridians live in coastal counties. Buildings cluster on low ground; more people than in any other state live on land less than four feet (1.2 metres) above the high-tide line. Florida's limestone bedrock makes it easy for salt water from surging seas to contaminate its freshwater aquifers. And it relies heavily on canals for flood control, which a sea-level rise of just six inches would devastate.

                                                                                              Adapted from The Economist, June 15th , 2013

                              Pediatric group advises parents to read to kids

June 26, 2014
By Amy Graff

                        

            Reading Go Dog Go to your 6 month old might seem like wasted time because she’s more likely to eat the book than help you turn the pages, but a statement released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) this week says reading in the early years is essential. Reading out loud gets parents talking to their babies and the sound of an adult’s voice stimulates that tiny yet rapidly growing brain. In the statement, the academy advises pediatricians to tell parents to read books to their children from birth.
            Reading regularly with young children stimulates optimal patterns of brain development and strengthens parent-child relationships at a critical time in child development, which, in turn, builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills that last a lifetime. Research shows that a child’s brain develops faster between 0 and 3 than at any other time in life, making the early years a critical time for babies to hear rich oral language. The more words children hear directed at them by parents and caregivers, the more they learn.
            While many babies are read Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar every night before bed, others never get a chance to “pat the bunny.” Studies reveal that children from low-income, less-educated families have significantly fewer books than their more affluent peers. By age 4, children in poverty hear 30 million fewer words than those in higher-income households. These dramatic gaps result in significant learning disadvantages that persist into adulthood. The AAP hopes the new guidelines will encourage all parents to start reading from day one.
            Research shows that when pediatricians talk with parents about reading, moms and dads are more likely to fill their home with books and read. Also, to help get more parents reading, the AAP is partnering with organizations such as Scholastic and Too Small to Fail to help get reading materials to new families who need books the most.
            This is the first time the AAP has made a recommendation on children’s literary education and it seems the timing might be just right as more and more parents are leaning on screens and electronic gadget to occupy their babies. “The reality of today’s world is that we’re competing with portable digital media,” Dr. Alanna Levine, a pediatrician in Orangeburg, N.Y., told The New York Times. “So you really want to arm parents with tools and rationale behind it about why it’s important to stick to the basics of things like books.”

                                                                                                                        (http://blog.seattlepi.com. Adaptado.)

Read the following passage and choose the option which best completes each question, according to the
text:

                                                                                      Students Should Be Tested More, Not Less

    “Testing is terrible for learning”. This often repeated saying has become accepted as true without proof. Opposition to testing and its associated ills has led to an over-generalization of the word “test” and an unjustifiable reputation as the personification of all that is wrong with education.
    Henry Roediger, a cognitive psychologist at Washington University, compared test results of students who used common study methods — reading material, highlighting, and writing notes — with the results from students repeatedly tested on the same material. Roediger found that taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying it. Remarkably, this remains true “even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information.”
    Some tests, however, are more effective in eliciting this positive effect than others. Standardized tests, like IQ tests, are designed to measure developed knowledge or abilities. They are “summative,” as they measure students’ sum total knowledge or ability at a fixed point in time. Summative tests are not intended to shape future teaching. “Formative assessments,” on the other hand, are designed to discover what students do and do not know in order to shape teaching. They are not meant to simply measure knowledge, but to expose gaps in knowledge so teachers may adjust future instruction accordingly. At the same time, students are alerted to these gaps, which allows them to shape their efforts to learn the information they missed.
    Roediger asserts that educators ought to be using formative assessments early and often in the classroom to strengthen learning throughout the unit rather than waiting until the end and giving a summative assessment.

((FROM: http://www.theatlantic.com. Acesso: 28/01/2014. Adapted.)