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

                         FOR CATS, A BIG GULP WITH A TOUCH OF THE TONGUE

             It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose. Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured. The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so - and that includes most adult carnivores - must resort to some other mechanism. Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.
             Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton. Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces. What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
             The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it. Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down - snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it. The cat laps four times a second - too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur - and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second. Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them - they lap at just that speed. To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.


WADE, Nicholas. For cats, a big gulp with a touch of the tongue. Disponível em: Acesso em: 20 nov. 2010.

                        ABORTION BECOMES ISSUE IN BRAZIL'S PRESIDENTIAL RUNOFF


             As Brazil's charismatic President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva makes a triumphant exit, having fostered a fast-growing economy that lifted millions out of poverty and pleased financial markets, his country seems more than ever to embody the word "progress" that is emblazoned across its national flag. But as the Oct. 31 run-off election to choose his successor approaches, the focus is shifting to one aspect of Brazilian society where many say there has been little progress: Abortion is still illegal, despite one in five Brazilian women undergoing the procedure in their lifetimes.
             With religious-right votes up for grabs in the upcoming poll, the two remaining candidates and the leading party are backing down from earlier abortion-rights endorsements, leading abortion-rights advocates to say that votes are being traded for women's health. Two-thirds of Brazil's 191 million people are Roman Catholics, making it the world's largest Catholic nation. But the number of those professing evangelical beliefs, some 17 percent of the population, is growing fast.
             The frenzy to collect more of those votes is causing Lula's left-wing Workers Party to mull whether to back off its commitment to see abortion rights debated in Congress, and the party's candidate, Dilma Rousseff, heavily favored to win, is distancing herself from abortion-rights comments she made before becoming a candidate.
             "It will be really ugly if the Workers Party pulls abortion rights from its agenda," said Regina Soares, a spokeswoman for the abortion-rights group Catholics for the Right to Decide. "[Abortion] is a problem of a huge size, which has same importance as unemployment and homelessness," she said. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in the case of rape or if the mother's life is in danger. Yet one in five Brazilian women under age 40 has had an abortion, the vast majority illegally. Half of those women end up in the hospital as the result of complications, said Marcelo Medeiros, an economist and sociologist who coordinated a 2009 government-funded abortion study. The abortion question shifted to the fore after Sunday's first-round presidential elections, in which Rousseff was expected to sail easily past the 50 percent mark that would have made a second round unnecessary. But she received 46.8 percent, forcing a runoff with centrist challenger Jose Serra at the end of the month. Support for the 62-year- old former guerrilla, Lula's chosen successor, eroded in part because the religious right aired ads portraying Rousseff as pro-abortion-rights, observers said. To shore up votes, the Workers Party is considering whether to yank its promise to see abortion rights debated in Congress. In his more recent position as Brazil's health minister, Serra, along with the Workers Party, has advocated for a debate on abortion in Congress in the name of public health. But during his campaign, Serra declared himself anti-abortion. Observers are split on whether the issue could prevent a Rousseff win. Alberto Almeida, director of market research group Instituto Analise, said voters don't see the difference between the abortion stances of Serra and Rousseff. "Abortion won't have a big role in the election because nobody has a clear position on abortion," Almeida said. But a Workers Party senator from Parana state said some of her party members could end up promoting legalized abortion, a position that could "cost the presidency," said Gleisi Hoffman, according to a Folha report. "While most Brazilians support abortion in special cases, the rest is "a gray area," Medeiros said.
Adapted from:


KELLER, Karen. Abortion Becomes Issue in Brazil's Presidential Runoff. Disponível em: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/abortion-becomes-an- issue-in-brazils-presidential-runoff/19665625. Acesso em: 4 nov. 2010.

Sebastião Salgado’s blue eyes have seen a bit of everything in this world - and this might not even be an exaggeration. For the past eight years in particular, the 69­year­old Brazilian photographer has travelled to more than 30 isolated regions of the world, collecting images of dozens of remote tribes, endangered animals and unusual landscapes.

The Genesis project is a singular photographic journey that began in 2004 and ended in 2012, at a cost of one million Euros a year. The result will be shown in magazines, books, a documentary by Wim Wenders and a series of exhibitions around the world, each displaying some 250 black­and­white photos.

The first exhibition will open in London on April 11, with former Brazilian President Lula - Salgado’s long­time friend - as special guest. “We want to create a little movement around these photos to provoke a debate on what we need to preserve,” he says. Salgado defends environmental causes through his organization, Instituto Terra. Even after travelling to so many exotic places, Salgado, now living in Paris, still takes vacations in Brazil. Here are excerpts from a conversation Salgado had with Folha, with new details about his travels, photographic techniques and new environmental projects.

• Coldest trip I visited the Nenets, in the Yamal peninsula, in northern Siberia, Russia. They are a nomadic tribe who raise reindeer in extreme Arctic conditions. When I went there it was spring and weather ranged between ­35ºC and ­45ºC. I didn’t wash myself for 45 days. They don’t take baths because there is no water. The only way to get water is to break off a piece of ice and warm it in a pot.

• Frozen equipment I used a Canon, an EOS1 Mark III, a very powerful machine. The problem was the batteries. In the Siberian temperatures, they quickly lost power. On average, I take 2,500 shots per battery, but this time I could only take 300­400 photos before the battery stopped working. I would put it inside my clothes, my assistant would give me another one, I would take 300 more pictures and, when that battery ran out energy, I would take out the other one and it would work again.

• Going digital for the first time I started Genesis with film and changed to digital. The airport X­Ray scanners degrade the quality of film, and so I decided to change to digital and was quite surprised. Quality was better than the one I had with negatives in medium format. I turned off the screen on the back of the camera, and used my camera as I have always done. When I came back to Paris, I printed contact sheets and edited the photos using a magnifying glass, because I don’t know how to do it in the computer.

• Stone Ages I met tribes that are still living in the Stone Ages, with working tools such as stone hammers. There were clans of about 10 people living in treetops. They had already seen white people before. They looked towards the direction I had come from and the chief asked me whether I was part of the white people clan that usually came from that direction. Because, for them, the world is all made of clans

• Brazilian arrows I met the Zo’e tribe, in Brazil, who were first discovered 15 years ago and live in a state of total purity. You see the guy working with an arrow. He warms it, put some weight on it, a straight feather if he wants a quicker arrow, a rounder one to have it slower. It is the same science as for rockets. And he’s got the same problem as in Cape Canaveral, to recover his rockets. If his ballistic calculations are wrong, he loses his arrow. He takes only 10 arrows with him when he goes hunting, no more than that

• Activist or photographer? Photography is my life. When I am taking photos, I am in a deep trance. When I have my camera and am travelling with the Nenets, it’s my life, morning to night. I have taken incredible photos, but my life is also the environment and Instituto Terra.

Finally, a Billboard That Creates Drinkable Water Out of Thin Air




¹Five Man Electrical Band: nome de um grupo de rock canadense.

²gimmick: algo que não é sério, usado para atrair a atenção das pessoas temporariamente, especialmente para fazê-las comprar algo.

³ingenuity: habilidade de pensar em novos meios inteligentes de se fazer algo.

In Higher Education, a Focus on Technology

By STEVE LOHR
The education gap facing the nation’s work force is evident in the numbers. Most new jobs will require more than a high school education, yet fewer than half of Americans under 30 have a (2) postsecondary degree of any kind. Recent state budget cuts, education experts agree, promise to make closing that gap even more difcult. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonproft education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools. An initial $20 million round of money, from the Gates Foundation, will be for postsecondary online courses, particularly ones tailored for community colleges and low-income young people. Another round of grants, for high school programs, is scheduled for next year.

Just how efective technology can be in improving education - by making students more efective, more engaged learners - is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring. If technology is well designed, experts say, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student- teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fne-tuning lessons. The potential benefts of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about ffth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is (3) ludicrous.”

(1)
higher education: educação superior.
(2)
postsecondary: termo que se refere aos cursos feitos após o high school ou, no modelo educacional brasileiro, o Ensino Médio.
(3)
ludicrous: ridícula, absurda.

Considere a tirinha que mostra os personagens Calvin e seu pai.