Questões de Vestibular
Comentadas sobre tradução | translation em inglês
Foram encontradas 31 questões
“The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.”
Oscar Wilde (Ireland, 1854 – 1900)
Extracted from https://americanliterature.com/author/oscar-wilde
Text
Volunteering is fun!
Disponível em: https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/magazine/life-around-world/volunteering-fun. Texto
adaptado. Acesso em: ago. 2020.
Leia o infográfico para responder à questão.
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the time we spend on our smartphones is interfering with our sleep, self-esteem, relationships, memory, attention spans, creativity, productivity and problem-solving and decision-making skills. But there is another reason for us to rethink our relationships with our devices. By chronically raising levels of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, our phones may be threatening our health and shortening our lives.
If they happened only occasionally, phone-induced cortisol spikes might not matter. But the average American spends four hours a day staring at their smartphone and keeps it within arm’s reach nearly all the time, according to a tracking app called Moment.
“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. “It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.”
But while doing so might soothe you for a second, it probably will make things worse in the long run. Any time you check your phone, you’re likely to find something else stressful waiting for you, leading to another spike in cortisol and another craving to check your phone to make your anxiety go away. This cycle, when continuously reinforced, leads to chronically elevated cortisol levels. And chronically elevated cortisol levels have been tied to an increased risk of serious health problems, including depression, obesity, metabolic syndrome, Type 2 diabetes, fertility issues, high blood pressure, heart attack, dementia and stroke.
(Catherine Price. www.nytimes.com, 24.04.2019. Adaptado.)
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.
Cerrado
Located between the Amazon, Atlantic Forests and Pantanal, the Cerrado is the largest savanna region in South America.
The Cerrado is one of the most threatened and overexploited regions in Brazil, second only to the Atlantic Forests in vegetation loss and deforestation. Unsustainable agricultural activities, particularly soy production and cattle ranching, as well as burning of vegetation for charcoal, continue to pose a major threat to the Cerrado’s biodiversity. Despite its environmental importance, it is one of the least protected regions in Brazil.
Facts & Figures
• Covering 2 million km2 , or 21% of the country’s territory, the Cerrado is the second largest vegetation type in Brazil.
• The area is equivalent to the size of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.
• More than 1,600 species of mammals, birds and reptiles have been identified in the Cerrado.
• Annual rainfall is around 800 to 1600 mm.
• The capital of Brazil, Brasilia, is located in the heart of the Cerrado. • Only 20% of the Cerrado’s original vegetation remains intact; less than 3% of the area is currently guarded by law.
(http://wwf.panda.org. Adaptado.)
Leia o texto para responder à questão.
Dying to defend the planet: why Latin America
is the deadliest place for environmentalists
February 11, 2017
Defending nature is a dangerous occupation, especially in Latin America. According to a recent report by Global Witness, an NGO, 185 environmental activists were murdered worldwide in 2015, an increase of 59% from the year before. More than half the killings were in Latin America. In Brazil 50 green campaigners died in 2015. Honduras is especially dangerous: 123 activists have died there since 2010, the highest number of any country relative to its population. Berta Cáceres, an indigenous leader who was a prominent campaigner against dams and plantations, was murdered there.
Why is Latin America so deadly? One reason is its abundant natural resources, which attract enterprises of all sorts, from multinationals to mafias. When prices are low, as they are now, the most rapacious do not go away; to maintain their profits they become more aggressive, says David Kaimowitz of the Ford Foundation, which gives money to good causes. New technologies open up new battlefronts. Soya beans bred to grow in tropical conditions have encouraged farmers to displace cattle ranchers, who in turn have advanced into the rainforest. Small prospectors can now extract gold from soil rather than just hunting around. That opens up new areas for exploitation, such as San Rafael de Flores in south-eastern Guatemala, where activists have been murdered.
The odds of finding the criminals are greater if the victim is foreign. Dorothy Stang, an American nun who fought to protect the Amazon rainforest, was killed in Brazil 12 years ago. Both the gunman and a rancher who had hired him eventually went to jail. But that is an exception.
(https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/02/11/
why-latin-america-is-the-deadliest-place-for-environmentalists. Adaptado)
Leia os cartuns 1 e 2 para responder à questão.
Coral reefs are colorful underwater forests which teem with life and act as a natural protective barrier for coastal regions. The fishes and plants which call them home belong to some of the most diverse ― and fragile ― ecosystems on the planet. Higher sea temperatures from global warming have already caused major coral bleaching events. Bleaching occurs when corals respond to the stress of warmer temperatures by expelling the colorful algae that live within them. Increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide result in higher levels of CO² in the water, leading to ocean acidification, which is also a threat to coral. As the oceans become more acidic, the corals' ability to form skeletons through calcification is inhibited, causing their growth to slow. Increasing sea levels caused by melting sea ice could also cause problems for some reefs by making them too deep to receive adequate sunlight, another factor important for survival.
(Adaptado de Coral Reefs, The National Wildlife Federation. Disponível em https://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Threats-to-Wildlife/GlobalWarming/Effects-on-Wildlife-and-Habitat/Coral-Reefs.aspx. Acessado em 26/07/2017.)
Considerando o texto e seus conhecimentos, assinale a alternativa correta.
Os recifes de corais estão seriamente ameaçados pela combinação dos seguintes fatores:
Comedian Janey Godley's tweets of a couple's train-bound row raise questions of how to protect our privacy in public places.
If the troubles of the two travellers had made it on to a newspaper first rather than a comedian's Twitter feed, would we be so relaxed about loss of privacy? I think perhaps not. Social media has done so much for freedom of expression, it would be cruel if it actually leads to less social freedom for fear of having our every misstep, angry word or misbehaviour broadcast there for all to see.
(Adaptado de David Banks, Should Twitter entertain millions with public rows? The Guardian, 13/07/2012. Disponível em https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/13/twittermillions-public-rows. Acessado em 10/07/2017.)
No artigo de opinião acima, o autor
Segundo o testemunho de Olaudah Equiano,
(Adaptado de Ajay Gautam, Lily Li e Kumar Srinivasan, Market watch: Therapeutic area ‘heat map’ for emerging markets. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 14, p. 518, jul. 2015.)
De acordo com o gráfico apresentado,
ZOMBIE NEUROSCIENCE
I don’t know if cockroaches dream, but I imagine if they do, jewel wasps feature prominently in their nightmares. These small, solitary tropical wasps are of little concern to us humans; after all, they don’t manipulate our minds so that they can serve us up as willing, living meals to their newborns, as they do to unsuspecting cockroaches. The story is simple, if grotesque: the female wasp controls the minds of the cockroaches she feeds to her offspring, taking away their sense of fear or will to escape their fate. What turns a once healthy cockroach into a mindless zombie it’s venom. Not just any venom, either: a specific venom that acts like a drug, targeting the cockroach's brain.
(Adaptado de Christie Wilcox, Zombie Neuroscience. Scientific American, New York, v. 315, n. 2, p. 70–73, 2016.)
De acordo com o autor,