Questões Militares Para aspirante da escola naval

                            How New Words Are Created

      Below we can find the description of five different processes that have led to the creation of new words in the English language.

      (I) ________

      Many of the new words added to the ever-growing lexicon of the English language are just created out of the blue, and often have líttle or no etymological pedigree. A good example is the word dog, etymologically unrelated to any other known word, which, in the late Middle Ages, suddenly and mysteriously displaced the Old English word hound (or hund) which had served for centuries.

      (II) ___________

      Some words arise simply as shortened forms of longer words (exam, gym, lab, bus, vet, phone and burger are some obvious and wellused examples). Perhaps less obvious is the derivation of words like goodbye (a shortening of God-be-with-you) and hello (a shortened form of the Old English for "whole be thou").

      (III) ______________

      Like many languages, English allows the formation of words by joining together shorter words (e.g. airport, seashore, fireplace, etc.). The concatenation of words in English may even allow for different meanings depending on the order of combination (e.g. houseboat/boathouse, casebook/bookcase, etc) .

      (IV) _______

      The drift of word meanings over time often arises, often but not always due to catachresis. By some estimates, over half of all words adopted into English from Latin have changed their meaning in some way over time, often drastically. For example, smart originally meant sharp, cutting or painful; A more modern example is the changing meaning of gay from merry to homosexual (and, in some circles in more recent years, to stupid or bad).

      (V) ______

      New words may arise due to mishearings or misrenderings. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries (most of them thankfully quite obscure) that owe their existence purely to typos or other misrenderings (e.g. shamefaced from the original shamefast, penthouse from pentice, sweetheart from sweetard, buttonhole from button-hold, etc).

                         (Adapted from http://wviw.thehistoryofenglish.com/issues_new.html) 

     American Students Test Well in Problem Solving, but Trail Foreign Counterparts 

      Fifteen-year-olds in the United States scored above the average of those in the developed world on exams assessing problem-solving skills, but they trailed several countries in Asia and Europe as well as Canada, according to International standardized tests results released on Tuesday.

      The American students who took the problem-solving tests in 2012, the first time they were administered, did better on these exams than on reading, math and Science tests, suggesting that students in the United States are better able to apply knowledge to real-life situations than perform straightforward academic tasks.

      Still, students who took the problem-solving tests in countries including Singapore, South Korea, Japan, several provinces of China, Canada, Australia, Finland and Britain all outperformed American students. 

      "The good news is that problem solving still remains a relatively strong suit for American students," said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group focused on improving high schools. "The challenge is that a lot of other nations are now developing this and even moving ahead. So where we used to, in an earlier era, dominate in what we called the deeper learning skills — Creative thinking, criticai thinking and the ability to solve problems — in terms of producing the workers that are increasingly needed in this area, other nations are coming on strong and in some cases surpassing us ." 

      The new problem-solving exams were administered to a subset of 15-year-olds in 28 countries who sat for the Program for International Student Assessment, a set of tests every three years commonly known as PISA and given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group whose members include the world's wealthiest nations. Almost 1,275 American students took the exams. 

      Critics of the rankings on International tests have tended to characterize the high performance of Asian countries in particular as demonstrating the rote learning of facts and formulas. But the problem-solving results showed that students in the highest-performing nations were also able to think flexibly. Even on Interactive tasks, the American students' strength, all the Asian countries that participated in this round of exams outperformed the United States. 

      "To understand how to navigate a complex problem and exercise abstract reasoning is actually a very strong point for the Asian countries," said Francesco Avvisati, an analyst on the PISA team at the O.E.C.D.

                                                                     (Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com)