Questões de Concursos Interpretação de texto Reading comprehension

Scientists study the world’s oldest person

1. After being bewildered by the “super grandmother’s” great health at 116 years old,
2. scientists are studying Maria Branyas, the world’s oldest person, in an attempt to unearth the
3. secret to a long life. Mr. Branyas was born __ San Francisco __ 1907, and __ the age of eight,
4. she moved __ Catalonia, Spain, where her family was originally from. Ms. Branyas, known to her
5. X followers as the “Super Catalan Grandma”, has lived in the region ever since and has resided
6. in the same nursing home, Residència Santa María del Tura, for the last 22 years.
7. She has agreed to undergo scientific testing, which researchers hope will further their
8. understanding of certain illnesses associated with old age, such as neurodegenerative or
9. cardiovascular diseases. Despite her age, Ms. Branyas has no health complications other than
10. mobility issues and hearing (she suffered permanent hearing loss when she was a child). She also
11. still has a great memory: “She has a completely lucid head,” scientist Manel Esteller told ABC, a
12. Spanish outlet. “She remembers with impressive clarity episodes of her when she was only four
13. years old, and she does not present any cardiovascular disease, common in elderly people.”
14. Esteller, who studies genetics and how it applies to health conditions, became curious about how
15. Ms. Branyas’ genetic makeup might affect her aging. After a long talk with Ms. Branyas, Mr.
16. Esteller believes there must be more to her longevity than meets the eye.
17. The remarkable woman has not had an easy life; she survived an earthquake while she
18. was in the US, a major fire, both world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Flu pandemic,
19. and more recently, COVID-19 in 2020. Despite the various pandemics, wars, and family losses
20. she has endured, her longevity has made scientists question what her secret could be. “We know
21. Maria’s chronological age, 116 years, but we must determine her biological age,” Esteller said to
22. ABC, believing that “she is much younger” physically. The scientist has taken biological samples
23. of saliva, blood, and urine from Ms. Branyas, which are thought to be the “longest-lived” biological
24. samples and have great scientific value, Josep Carreras, the head of a leukemia research institute,
25. said to ABC. The samples will be compared with the 116-year-old’s middle daughter, who is 79
26. years old.
27. Ms. Branyas often has been asked what her secret is to her long life, and she uses her X
28. account to post her advice for others. She attributed her longevity to “order, tranquillity, good
29. connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no
30. regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people”. However, she also credits a great
31. amount of luck. “It is clear that there is a genetic component because there are several members
32. of her family who are over 90 years old,” said Esteller. The rare biological samples will assess her
33. genes, which will hopefully advance the research of drugs that could help diseases associated
34. with age and cancer. As for Ms. Branyas, she said on her X account that she is “very happy she
35. can be useful for research and progress”.

(Available in: https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/lifestyle/maria-branyas-oldest-person-alive-spain-b2436228.html – text especially adapted for this test).

Navy looking for drone operator flying device around

Washington state base

Published February 27, 2016 Foxnews.com

(I) _________

A civilian employee of Naval Submarine Base Kitsap-Bangor reported seeing the drone, spokeswoman Silvia Klatman told Military.com.

According to the Navy, it is illegal to operate a drone above the base without the permission of the Navy. "It's our intent to support the investigation and prosecution of this reported act, and any others that may occur, in coordination with civilian law enforcement," Klatman said.

Military.com reported that agents interviewed families who lived in houses surrounding the base. (II) _______Officials said the drones were seen operating at night. "It could be a hoax, but worst-case scenario, it could be clandestine, a foreign government, a cell," Al Starcevich, whose family's house is located between the base and Hood Canal in Washington, told the website. "The creepy thing is they' re only doing it at night. (Ill) ______ "

Starcevich told The Seattle Times that agents told him there had been repeated incidents around the base involving an alleged drone.

Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor's airspace was designated as "prohibited" by the FAA in May 2005, at the request of the Navy. (IV) ______ The prohibited area extends to the water across Hood Canal and the Navy-owned portion of Toandos Peninsula.

Doug O'Donnell, chief pilot at Avian Flight Center at Bremerton National Airport, said security forces are supposed to shoot down aircraft that violate the FAA riiles.

The Bangor base houses eight of the Navy's 14 ballistic-missile submarines, according to Military,com. Each can carry up to 24 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads.

The Defense Department has held countless classified exercises to counter possible drone attacks, The Seattle Times reported. Last year, one exercise included a Marine sniper shooting one down from a military helicopter,

(http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/02/27/navy-looking-for-drone-operator-flying-device-around-washington-state-base.html)

Text 4

Help students to learn vocabulary in context

The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters (comprehension or production) with words within the context of surrounding discourse. Data from linguistic corpora can provide real-world actual language that has been printed or spoken. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on dictionary definitions, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear. Students will then associate new words with a meaningful context to which they apply. For example, for a beginning level of students, pictures, realia, and gestures can be used to describe meaning incontext. For a more advanced level of students, encourage them to consult online corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, or the Corpus of Contemporary American English: COCA) to gain knowledge of patterned sequences, particularly collocations or words that go together (Liu & Jiang, 2009).

Encourage students to develop word-learning strategies

Included in the discussion of teaching reading were such strategies as guessing vocabulary in context. A number of clues are available to learners to develop word-attack strategies.

Considering that only a small fraction of the word list can be covered inside the classroom, it is necessary for students to develop effective strategies for learning vocabulary on their own. Word-learning strategies refer to “the planned approaches that a word-learner takes as an agent of his or her own word learning” (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 297). Once they encounter unknown words, they can try to figure out how the words are used by asking questions such as:

• Is the word countable or uncountable?

• Is there a particular preposition that follows it?

• Is it a formal word?

• Does it have positive or negative connotations? (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 298)

An effective way to encourage word-learning is to urge students to use vocabulary notebooks to enter new words, and to review them daily, once they identify their learning goals. Studies show that in order to understand television shows learners need to know about 3,000 word families and have knowledge of proper nouns (Web & Rodgers, 2009). If they wish to read novels and newspapers comfortably, they need to have a vocabulary size of 8,000–9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). The fact that increasing vocabulary size will influence the degree to which they can understand and use language may motivate them to be determined to expand their vocabulary notebooks.

Unfortunately, professional pendulums have a disturbing way of swinging too far one way or the other, and sometimes the only way we can get enough perspective to see these overly long arcs is through hindsight. Hindsight has now taught us that there was some overreaction to the almost exclusive attention that grammar and vocabulary received in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. So-called “natural” approaches in which grammar was considered damaging were equally overreactive. Advocating the “absorption” of grammar and vocabulary with no overt attention whatsoever to language forms went too far. We now seem to have a healthy respect for the place of form-focused instruction — attention to those basic “bits and pieces” of a language — in an interactive curriculum. And now we can pursue the business of finding better and better techniques for getting these bits and pieces into the communicative repertoires of our learners.

BROWN, H. D.; LEE, H.. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Fourth Edition. New York: Longman. 2015.