Questões de Vestibular Sobre vocabulário | vocabulary em inglês

TEXTO 3  

                                       O outro

     Ele me olhou como se estivesse descobrindo o mundo. Me olhou e reolhou em fração de segundo. Só vi isso porque estava olhando-o na mesma sintonia. A singularização do olhar. Tentei disfarçar virando o pescoço para a direita e para a esquerda, como se estivesse fazendo um exercício, e numa dessas viradas olhei rapidamente para ele no volante. Ele me olhava e volveu rapidamente os olhos, fingindo estar tirando um cisco da camisa. Era um ser de meia idade, os cabelos com alguns fios grisalhos, postura de gente séria, camisa branca, um cidadão comum que jamais flertaria com outra pessoa no trânsito. E assim, enquanto o semáforo estava no vermelho para nós, ficou esse jogo de olhares que não queriam se fixar, mas observar o outro espécime que nada tinha de diferente e ao mesmo tempo tinha tudo de diferente. Ele era o outro e isso era tudo. É como se, na igualdade de milhares de humanos, de repente, o ser se redescobrisse num outro espécime. Quando o semáforo ficou verde, nós nos olhamos e acionamos os motores. 

                                              (GONÇALVES, Aguinaldo. Das estampas. São Paulo: Nankin, 2013. p. 130.)

                              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.)

Analise o cartum a seguir.

                         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.

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.

How can consumers find out if a corporation is “greenwashing” environmentally unsavory practices?