Questões de Concursos Interpretação de texto Reading comprehension

Doctor works to save youth from violence before they reach his ER

As an emergency physician at Kings County Hospital Center [in Brooklyn], Dr. Rob Gore has faced many traumatic situations that he'd rather forget. But some moments stick with him. "Probably the worst thing that I've ever had to do is tell a 15-year-old's mother that her son was killed," Gore said. "If I can't keep somebody alive, I've failed." [...]

"Conflict's not avoidable. But violent conflict is," Gore said. "Seeing a lot of the traumas that take place at work, or in the neighborhood, you realize, 'I don't want this to happen anymore. What do we do about it?"

For Gore, one answer is the “Kings Against Violence Initiative" - known as KAVI - which he started in 2009. Today, the nonprofit has anti-violence programs in the hospital, schools and broader community, serving more than 250 young people.

Victims of violence are more likely to be reinjured, so the first place Gore wanted to work was in the hospital, with an intervention program in which "hospital responders" assist victims of violence and their family - a model pioneered at other hospitals. The idea is that reaching out right after someone has been injured reduces the likelihood of violent retaliation and provides a chance for the victim to address some of the circumstances that may have led to their injury.

Gore started this program at his hospital with a handful of volunteers from KAVI. Today, the effort is a partnership between KAVI and a few other nonprofits, with teams on call 24/7.

Yet Gore wanted to prevent people from being violently injured in the first place. So, in 2011, he and his group began working with a handful of at-risk students at a nearby high school. By the end of the year, more than 50 students were involved. Today, KAVI holds weekly workshops for male and female students in three schools, teaching mediation and conflict resolution. The group also provides free mental health counseling for students who need one-on-one support.

"Violence is everywhere they turn - home, school, neighborhood, police," Gore said. "You want to make sure they can learn how to process, deal with it and overcome it."

While Gore still regularly attends workshops, most are now led by peer facilitators - recent graduates and college students, some of whom are former KAVI members - who serve as mentors to the students. School administrators say the program has been a success: lowering violence, raising grades and sending many graduates on to college.

"This is really about the community in which we live" he said. "This is my home. And I'm going to do whatever is possible to make sure people can actually thrive."

(Adapted and abridged from http ://www.cnn.com)

READ TEXT III AND ANSWER THE QUESTION THAT FOLLOWS IT:

Plastic Dreams

by Sarah Thompson

Plastic dreams, oh plastic dreams, a vision turned nightmare,

Once a symbol of progress, now a burden we must bear.

Our landfills overflow with your synthetic remains,

A haunting testament to our unsustainable chains.

Plastic dreams, oh plastic dreams, a promise unfulfilled,

Your convenience a facade, your consequences concealed.

Let us wake from this slumber, this toxic desire,

To create a world where nature's essence can inspire.

In our hands lies the power, to choose a different fate,

To abandon plastic dreams and embrace a sustainable state.

For only through conscious choices, can we break this vicious spell,

And ensure a future where our planet and poetry can dwell.

From: https://poemverse.org/poems-about-plasticwaste/#2_the_sea_s_lament_by_michael_anderson

Based on the text below, answer the question.

Why Join the Navy?

In the Navy, you' 11 find there' s much more to be gained than a regular paycheck. In fact, the Navy experience can shape your future through outstanding financial benefits, unparalleled career potential, and the lifestyle of freedom and personal growth that you've been waiting for.

(I) _______

Launch your future in any of dozens of dynamic career and j ob areas - each with excellent opportunities to earn promotions by advancing through the ranks.

(II) ________

Report to work in a dif f erent time zone or a dif f erent hemisphere. Take on lif e as a world traveler. Experience people and places that most others simply canft . And see firsthand the positive impact you'11 make - for yourseif, your country and the world at large.

(III) _______

Do it all while earning competitive pay, generous vacation time and other special bonuses that make the difference between getting ahead and just getting by.

(IV) _______

The Navy has a strong interest in the long-term health of its Sailors and their families, which means that outstanding benefits are standard - for both you and your family, including full coverage from some of the nation's most talented professionals.

(V) _______

Think about it . As long as you have the drive to make a difference in the world - and in your own life - there will be a place for you in America's Navy. Enlist now!

(Adapted from http://www.navy.com/joining/why-join.html

Switzerland’s invisible linguistic borders

There are four official Swiss languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh, an indigenous language with limited status that's similar to Latin and spoken today by only a handful of Swiss. A fifth language, English, is increasingly used to bridge the linguistic divide. In a recent survey by Pro Unguis, three quarters of those queried said they use English at least three times per week.

In polyglot Switzerland, even linguistic divisions are divided. People in the German-speaking cantons speak Swiss-German at home but learn standard German in school. The Italian spoken in the Ticino canton is peppered with words borrowed from German and French.

Language may not be destiny, but it does determine much more than the words we speak. Language drives culture, and culture drives life. In that sense, the Rõstigraben is as much a cultural border as a linguistic one. Life on either side of the divide unfolds at a different pace, Bianchi explained. “[In my opinion] French speakers are more laid-back. A glass of white wine for lunch on a workday is still rather usual. German speakers have little sense of humour, and follow rules beyond the rigidity of the Japanese."

The cultural divide between Italian-speaking Switzerland and the rest of the country - a divide marked by the so-called Polentagraben - is even sharper. Italianspeakers are a distinct minority, accounting for only 8% of the population and living mostly in the far southern canton of Ticino. “When I first moved here, people told me, Ticino is just like Italy except everything works’, and I think that's true,” said Paulo Gonçalves, a Brazilian academic who has been living in Ticino for the past decade.

Coming from a nation with one official spoken language, Gonçalves marvels at how the Swiss juggle four. “It is quite remarkable how they manage to get along,” he said, recalling going to a conference attended by people who spoke French, German, Italian and English. "You had presentations being given in four different languages in the same conference hall.’’

Living in such a multilingual environment "really reshapes how I see the world and imagine the possibilities,” Gonçalves said. “I am a significantly different person than I was 10 years ago.”

Switzerland’s languages are not evenly distributed. Of the country’s 26 cantons, most - 17 - are German speaking, while four are French and one Italian. (Three cantons are bilingual and one, Grisons, trilingual.) A majority of Swiss, 63%, speak German as their first language.

(Abridged from http ://www.bbc.com)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

While plastic refuse littering beaches and oceans draws high-profile attention, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Assessment of agricultural plastics and their sustainability: a call for action suggests that the land we use to grow our food is contaminated with even larger quantities of plastic pollutants. “Soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics and are known to contain larger quantities of microplastics than oceans”, FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo said in the report’s foreword.

According to data collated by FAO experts, agricultural value chains each year use 12.5 million tonnes of plastic products while another 37.3 million are used in food packaging. Crop production and livestock accounted for 10.2 million tonnes per year collectively, followed by fisheries and aquaculture with 2.1 million, and forestry with 0.2 million tonnes. Asia was estimated to be the largest user of plastics in agricultural production, accounting for almost half of global usage. Moreover, without viable alternatives, plastic demand in agriculture is only set to increase. As the demand for agricultural plastic continues surge, Ms. Semedo underscored the need to better monitor the quantities that “leak into the environment from agriculture”.

Since their widespread introduction in the 1950s, plastics have become ubiquitous. In agriculture, plastic products greatly help productivity, such as in covering soil to reduce weeds; nets to protect and boost plant growth, extend cropping seasons and increase yields; and tree guards, which protect young plants and trees from animals and help provide a growth-enhancing microclimate. However, of the estimated 6.3 billion tonnes of plastics produced before 2015, almost 80 per cent had never been properly disposed of. While the effects of large plastic items on marine fauna have been well documented, the impacts unleashed during their disintegration potentially affect entire ecosystems.

(https://news.un.org, 07.12.2021. Adaptado.)

READ TEXT II AND ANSWER THE FOUR QUESTION THAT FOLLOW IT.

TEXT IV

Assessment for Young Learners in the English Language Classroom

All forms of assessment have an impact on school and classroom culture – it can drive what is taught and how. The process and outcomes of assessment also affect both the teachers’ and the learners’ understanding and experience of learning. Our most common understanding of assessment is that it summarises attainment. This has an especially strong focus in education where summative assessments, the achievement tests that typically occur at the end of an instructional programme, have guided the emphasis in curricula. In true terms, however, assessment is the process of collecting and interpreting evidence to make judgements about a learner’s performance. Thinking about the process in this way allows teachers to gather evidence as an ongoing activity during the learning programme and, as a result, to identify strengths and weaknesses that inform future classroom content. This formative approach, where assessment forms part of the learning cycle, is able to capture more detailed and nuanced data about a learner’s performance than the broader brush stroke of a summative score and consequently supports deeper and more consequential learning. More importantly, there is an influential argument that, in education, we should not even be doing assessment unless it has an impact on learning, and this goes to the heart of the purposes of assessment.

Adapted from: https://www.cambridge.org/us/files/9516/0217/6403/ CambridgePapersInELT_AssessmentForYLs_2020_ONLINE.PDF

Read the text to answer question.

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)

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder às questões de 1 a 9.

Valdivia Figurines and the appeal of 'the oldest'

(1º§) The logo for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture website is about my favourite thing of the afternoon which is saying a lot since I spent much of the day reading about giant Olmec heads. Three Valdivia Figurines in the colours of the Ecuadorian flag? I am sold! Golly, I love Valdivia figurines for all the right and all the wrong reasons.

(2º§) There are two things that can easily be said about Valdivia figurines: they are VERY Ecuadorian and they are VERY looted. The first explains why they appear prominently on the Ministry of Culture website (and on stencilled graffiti around Quito circa 2007). Ancient Ecuador has played second fiddle to Ancient Peru since the early days of archaeology. The Valdivia culture, however, represents something that Peru doesn't have, 'the oldest'. Everyone loves 'the oldest', national pride, etc. etc.

(3º§) Who else loves 'the oldest'? Collectors and Museums. If the Valdivia pottery sequence is the oldest in the new world, collectors want a slice of that pie. Heck, even better than some junky pottery, the Valdivia made interesting figurines: lovely ladies that look good on stark black backgrounds in auction catalogues. They are part of 'the oldest' yet they also look good.

(4º§) Valdivia sites are famously looted and Valdivia figurines are famously faked. A few years back I started doing some initial work into looting in Ecuador (which led to fieldwork in Quito and the cloud forest that didn't really go anywhere as of yet) and I, like anyone else going down that road, came across Bruhns and Hammond's 1983 Journal of Field Archaeology piece 'A Visit to Valdivia'. Knowing nothing at all about Ecuador at the time, I had never heard of Valdivia, a wonder since the only Ecuadorian archaeology books that Cambridge owns are a few by the late Betty Meggars and Emilio Estrada from the 1950s and 1960s which link uber-ancient Ecuador to Jomon Period Japan (yeah...I know). As Bruhns and Hammond relate, Meggars detected faking at Valdivia immediately after the start of her excavations: practical jokers who discovered a market for their copies. As the market for the pieces grew, the presumed fakes get more and more elaborate and fanciful...and Valdivia sites were just looted to pieces.

(5º§) So really with Valdivia we are left with a situation where we don't know what is real. It is directly comparable to the Cycladic Figurine problem: the corpus is mostly looted, it contains tons of forms not found in the limited archaeological excavations that have been conducted, and we intellectual consumers of artefacts don't know what to believe. To me Valdivia figurines are the perfect looting Catch 22: they warrant study so that the interested public can learn about 'the oldest', but they can't be studied because collectors wanted 'the oldest' so sites were looted and buckets of fakes were produced.

(6º§) In 2007 I bought a fake Valdivia figurine in Otavalo which now stands in a Spondylus shell on my counter and watches me cook. The fella selling it to me told me it was real. I knew it wasn't but made to put it back saying something along the lines that law breaking makes me sick. He quickly agreed that it wasn't real and cut his asking price by a ton. Que Sera. Three cheers, Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture, your logo is the best.

https://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2012/09/valdivia-figurines-a

nd-appeal-of-oldest.html

Climate change poses significant challenges to cattle farming, a sector vital to global food security. Among the most pressing concerns is the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts. Reduced rainfall diminishes pasture quality and availability, limiting feed for livestock and increasing water scarcity. This can lead to decreased animal growth rates, reduced milk production, and increased mortality rates. Moreover, prolonged droughts can contribute to desertification, shrinking available grazing land and forcing farmers to adopt costly alternative feeding strategies.

Beyond drought, other climate-related impacts include heat stress, which can significantly impact animal health and productivity. Rising temperatures can exacerbate heat stress, leading to decreased feed intake, reduced fertility, and increased mortality in livestock. Furthermore, extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall and flooding, can cause infrastructure damage, contaminate water sources, and lead to the loss of livestock.

The cattle farming sector itself contributes to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, primarily methane produced during animal digestion and nitrous oxide from manure management. Deforestation for pasture expansion also releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide.

To address these challenges, a multi-pronged approach is crucial.

• Genetic selection: Breeding programs focused on developing drought-resistant livestock breeds are vital. and heat-tolerant

• Sustainable feeding strategies: Implementing precision feeding techniques, improving feed efficiency, and exploring alternative drought-resistant forage livestock resilience. feed sources, varieties, such as can enhance

• Integrated farming systems: Integrating crop and livestock production, such as through agroforestry systems, can improve soil health, enhance water retention, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Technological innovations: Utilizing technologies such as precision livestock farming, remote sensing for pasture monitoring, and renewable energy sources can improve resource efficiency and redu

Furthermore, strong policy support, including incentives for sustainable farming practices, investments in research and development, and improved access to climate information services, are essential for the long-term sustainability of the cattle farming sector.

Addressing the challenges posed by climate change requires a collaborative effort involving farmers, researchers, policymakers, and consumers. By embracing innovative solutions, prioritizing sustainable practices, and fostering a collective understanding of the importance of climate-resilient livestock production, we can ensure a future when this vital sector continues to thrive while minimizing its environmental impact.

Internet:<conafer.org.br> (adapted).