Questões de Concursos Interpretação de texto Reading comprehension

READ TEXT I AND ANSWER THE FIVE QUESTION THAT FOLLOW IT

TEXT I

National Assessment Reform: Core Considerations for Brazil

Education has been an integral part of Brazil’s success story. With expanded access to basic education and improvements in literacy rates, young Brazilians are entering today’s workforce with higher levels of education than previous generations. This educational progress has contributed to and benefited from the economic growth that helped improve living standards and, during the first decade of the millennium, lifted more than 29 million people out of poverty. Trend data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that Brazil’s increasing school participation rates have been realised alongside progress in education quality. This is a remarkable achievement considering that many of the new students progressing through the education system come from disadvantaged backgrounds and often lack the socio-economic support that helps enable learning. Nevertheless, PISA also reveals that the overall performance of Brazil’s education system is well below the OECD average and other emerging economies, such as parts of China and the Russian Federation. One reason for this is Brazil’s high share of students who do not achieve baseline proficiency, or Level 2 in PISA. Results from PISA 2018 show that 50% of Brazilian students failed to reach Level 2 in reading, meaning they can only complete basic tasks. Brazil’s share of low-performers was even higher in Mathematics and Science (68% and 55%, respectively). At the other end of the spectrum, few students in Brazil were able to answer more difficult PISA questions, like inferring neutrality or bias in a text, which require skills that are increasingly important in today’s world. The new approach to education, set out in the BNCC, aims not only to ensure that all students achieve basic cognitive skills but also develop the higher-order skills needed to solve complex problems of everyday life.

Adapted from: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/333a6e20- en.pdf?expires=1728831657&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=CD292865CAA9F4B A019D2FE4378B5D2D

“There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness. ”

— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

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No one who speaks English has any difficulty understanding the meaning of a sentence like ‘It’s warm in here’. We all recognise that it is a comment on the temperature in some place or other. But why it is being said, and what the speaker wishes to convey by saying it, depends entirely on two things: the context in which it is said and what the speaker wants people to understand (...) The meaning of language depends on where it occurs within a larger stretch of discourse, and thus the relationship that the different language elements have with what comes before and after them. In other words, speakers and writers have to be able to operate with more than just words and grammar; they have to be able to string utterances together.

Our ability to function properly in conversation or writing depends not only on reacting to the context in which we are using the language, but also on the relationship between words and ideas in longer texts.

Words can also mean more than one thing, for example, ‘book’ (= something to read, to reserve, a list of bets, etc.), ‘beat’ (= to win, to hit, to mix, e.g. an egg, the ‘pulse’ of music/a heart) and ‘can’ (= ability, permission, probability – and a container made of metal). Notice that, in these examples, not only can the same form have many meanings, but it can also be different parts of speech.

With so many available meanings for words and grammatical forms, it is the context the word occurs in which determines which of these meanings is being referred to. If we say, ‘I beat him because I ran faster than he did’, ‘beat’ is likely to mean won rather than physically assaulted or mixed (though there is always the possibility of ambiguity, of course).

(Harmer, 1998. Adaptado)

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Segundo Kramasch (2024), o conceito de competência intercultural recebeu um novo significado por meio do uso de comunicação mediada por computadores (CMC), com o objetivo de promover a interação na L2 entre falantes nativos e não nativos da língua e entre falantes não nativos, e de capacitá-los a ter acesso a e manipular ambientes culturais não nacionais.

O acesso direto a falantes da L2 e a imersão cultural promovida pela CMC realçam a ilusão do imediatismo semiótico e a autenticidade cultural. Entretanto, não conduziu, necessariamente, a uma exploração profunda de diferenças culturais. A comunicação intercultural online enfatizou a participação em comunidades online, a colaboração, a solução conjunta de problemas e o desenvolvimento de identidades híbridas que tanto independem das coações sociais do mundo real, quanto ficam sujeitas às pressões sociais e às coações coletivas das comunidades online. Não é à toa que há um número crescente de linguistas aplicados que estão ávidos a trazer a história, a memória e os aspectos subjetivos da aprendizagem de línguas de volta à sala de aula, bem como uma reflexão sobre o significado de operar entre línguas, a partir do background cultural do próprio indivíduo.

(Kramasch, C. 2024. Adaptado)

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Robots are writing more of what we read on the internet. And artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools are becoming freely available for anyone, including students, to use.

In a period of rapid change, there are enormous ethical implications for post-human authorship — in which humans and machines collaborate. The study of AI ethics needs to be central to education as we increasingly use machinegenerated content to communicate with others.

AI robot writers, such as GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) take seconds to create text that seems like it was written by humans. In September, 2020 GPT-3 wrote an entire essay in The Guardian to convince people not to fear artificial intelligence. As recently as 2019, this kind of technology seemed a long way off. But today, it is readily available.

Of course, there’s the issue of cheating on essays and other assignments. School and university leaders need to have difficult conversations about what constitutes “authorship” and “editorship” in the post-human age. We are all (already) writing with technological devices, even just via spelling and grammar checkers.

(https://theconversation.com. Adaptado)

PART 1: READING COMPREHENSION

The War at Home: The Struggle for Veterans to Find Jobs

In today's tough and competitive job market, it can be challenging for any adult to land a decent job. Though education can definitely improve outcomes, sometimes it's not just abont the degree. Experience can also play a major role in helping people find jobs. Yet in some cases, if you do not have the right kind of experience, this may be of little help. Just ask one of the many college-educated military veterans who serve their country only to return to find a job market that will treat them as rookies.

Army veteran John Lee Dumas said he had zero anxieties about finding a job after graduating college and had been told that his military experience would give him a leg up on other candidates. But things did not turn out that way.

"I quickly found out that I was lumped together with recent college grads for entry-level positions, and that an employee that had two years' experience at a job in a similar industry was considered way more qualified than I was despite my four years as an officer in the army", Dumas said.

When Dumas did find work, he said it was difficult to acclimate to the civilian Office environment.

"I often found that my peers and above had a hard time dealing with my direct approach and attitude about tackling problems head on, often asking for forgiveness rather than permission", he said.

One issue is that veterans are too modest when it comes to stating their accomplishments in the military.

"For some reason, I've had veterans not tell me about their awards and honors, but it should all be listed - from commander' s coins to medals of honor," Hurwitz said.

Navy veteran Tom Graves, who has a career in world force development helping companies understand the benefits of hiring skilled and experienced military veterans, agreed.

(Adapted from http://www.onlinecollege.org)

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Texto 4

According to information from the MetSouth, the heat wave has already begun, affecting mainly the South and Southeast of Brazil, with atypically high temperatures for the month of November, a period that is already historically hot, but which, in 2023, could see records broken.

Until Friday (10), the most intense heat should be concentrated in the Central-West and in the interior of São Paulo, but from the weekend onwards the mass of hot air increases and the maximum temperatures begin to reach more areas of Brazil, just as it was in September and October. (...)

Disponível em: <https://www.showmetech.com.br/en/brasil-se-prepara-para-

maior-onda-de-calor-da-historia/>. Acesso em: 13 nov. 2023. [Adaptado].