Questões de Concursos Professor de Inglês

Pollution

Thick black smoke curling out of smokestacks, horrible-tasting chemicals in your drinking water, pesticides in your food - these are examples of pollution. Pollution is any contamination of the environment which causes harm to the environment or the inhabitants of the environment. There are many kinds of pollution, and there are many pollutants. Some obvious kinds of pollution are pollution of the air, soil, and water. Some less obvious, or less salient kinds of pollution are radioactive, noise, light pollution, and green-house gasses.

Air pollution can be caused by particles, liquids, or gases that make the air harmful to breathe. There are two main types of air pollution: primary and secondary. Primary pollutants enter the air directly, like smoke from factories and car exhaust. Secondary pollutants are chemicals that mix together to pollute the air, like mixtures of emissions, or waste output, from vehicles and factory smoke that change to form more dangerous pollutants in the air and sunlight.

Soil pollution can be caused by pesticides, leakage..........................chemical tanks, oil spills, and other chemicals..........................get into the soil by dumping or accidental contamination. Soil pollution can also cause water pollution.............................underground water becomes contaminated by coming.............................contact with the polluted soil.

Water pollution can be caused by waste products, sewage, oil spills, and litter in streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Some scientists believe that water pollution is the largest cause of death and disease in the world, causing about 14,000 deaths in the world each day.

Radioactive pollution can be caused by leaks or spills of radioactive materials. These materials can come from medical sources, nuclear power plants, or laboratories which handle radioactive materials. Air, soil, and water can be polluted by radioactivity. It can cause damage to animals, both internally and externally, by eating, drinking, or touching it. It can cause birth defects and genetic problems. It can cause certain cancers and other deadly diseases.

Noise pollution can be caused by vehicle, aircraft, and industrial noise. It can also be caused by military or experimental sonar. Noise has health effects on people and animals. In people, it can cause high blood pressure, heart problems, sleep disturbances, and hearing problems. In animals, it can cause communication, reproductive, and navigation problems – they have difficulty finding their direction. Sonar has even caused whales to beach themselves because they respond to the sonar as if it were another whale.

Light pollution can be caused by advertising signs, stadium and city lighting, and other artificial lighting (like the light caused by night traffic). Artificial lighting has health effects on humans and animals. In people, it can cause high blood pressure and affect sleeping and waking rhythms and immunity. It might be a factor in some cancers, such as breast cancer. In animals, it can affect sleeping and waking rhythms, navigation, and reproduction.

In addition, greenhouse gases have caused a warming effect on the earth’s climate. The greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone. They are naturally–occurring gases in the atmosphere, but human activity has increased their concentration in the atmosphere. For example, the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have risen due to the burning of fossil fuels. The effect is a rise in global temperatures. The higher temperatures cause the melting of glaciers, a rise in the water level of oceans, and the disruption of both land and marine life, including that of humans. Although carbon dioxide is necessary for plants to survive, it is also considered to be a kind of pollution because high levels of carbon dioxide have caused the oceans to become more acidic.

It is not possible for anyone to predict the exact timing and effects of global pollution and global climate change brought about by pollution. There is general agreement by scientists that the global climate will continue to change, that the intensity of weather effects will continue to increase, and that some species of animals will become extinct. There is also general agreement, or consensus, that humans need to take steps to reduce emissions of waste products and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, make adaptations to the changes that are occurring, and figure out ways of reversing the trends of pollution and global warming.

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The enduring joy of Golden Girls: a wildly sassy sitcom that will always cheer you up

A comedic masterclass with the best sitcom theme song of all time, Golden Girls pulled back the curtains on ageing and dealt with big-ticket issues.

A zinger-infused maelstrom of shoulder pads, pastels and perms. Rattan furniture, DayGlo linen and Formica. There’s such a distinctive look, feel and vibe to The Golden Girls, the iconic sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1992, scooping up 68 Emmy nominations and 11 wins in the process. The brainchild of producer Susan Harris, the show spawned several acclaimed spinoffs and became an enduring work of high camp in the process.

The premise? Three older women decide to live together: the stern, witty ex-teacher Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), the sweet but fantastically dense Rose Nylund (Betty White) and southern hornbag Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan). At first it’s a matter of convenience, but before long, they become fast friends. During the pilot they’re joined by a fourth: Dorothy’s mother Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), a nitpicky little shrew whose ability to cockblock our heroines saw her gradually become the Scrappy-Doo of the house. (Don’t @ me, Goldies, you know I’m right.)

For a comedy that primarily took place within a Floridian kitchen, The Golden Girls boasted some serious talent. The four leads were all astoundingly adept at their craft.

The golden girls themselves proved that the family you make is sometimes stronger than the one you’re born with. Dorothy, Rose and Blanche feel, at times, aged out of their previous lives. Careers, spouses, the world: all seem to be pushing them away. But the girls are proof that you can – and should – forge new bonds, even if it seems like your old life is done for. That you can make a new family, even if your old one rejects you.

The Golden Girls pulled back the curtains on ageing, showing the ways in which old people can be flawed, passionate, monumentally stupid, brave – even at times, almost heroically horny. And it did so with an almost reckless willingness to be as wildly funny as it possibly could.

The show ended up doing what many sitcoms do: use antagonism as heat to push the plot forward. It takes truly hack writers to defend needless antagonism as the only source of fuel to propel a story (I’m looking at you, post-Sorkin West Wing). The last two seasons of The Golden Girls aren’t terrible, but Sophia morphs from an old lady without boundaries to an ancient sociopathic prankster. But even with this odd acceleration towards a caricatured sitcom event horizon, the show still manages to roll out the hits. The two-part finale, written by Mitch Hurwitz (the creator of Arrested Development) and starring Leslie Nielsen as Dorothy’s love interest, ranks as some of the best in the show’s history.

It also has – and I cannot stress this enough – the best sitcom theme song in the history of sitcom theme songs. In 2023, there are few things that will haul you out of whatever psychic muck you find yourself in than whacking on an episode of The Golden Girls. I promise you, once the credits roll, you’ll find yourself lying on the lanai in your mind, feeling somehow much lighter than you did before.

(The Guardian 2024, The Guardian website. Accessed: 06 February 2024. Available: <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/02/goldengirls-tv-sitcom-enduring-joy-dorothy-rose-betty-white-blanche>. Adapted.)

Plurilingualism and translanguaging: commonalities and divergences

Both plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices in the education of language minoritized students remain controversial, for schools have a monolingual and monoglossic tradition that is hard to disrupt, even when the disrupting stance brings success to learners. At issue is the national identity that schools are supposed to develop in their students, and the Eurocentric system of knowledge, circulated through standardized named languages, that continues to impose what Quijano (2000) has called a coloniality of power.

All theories emerge from a place, an experience, a time, and a position, and in this case, plurilingualism and translanguaging have developed, as we have seen, from different loci of enunciation. But concepts do not remain static in a time and place, as educators and researchers take them up, as they travel, and as educators develop alternative practices. Thus, plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes look the same, and sometimes they even have the same practical goals. For example, educators who say they use plurilingual pedagogical practices might insist on developing bilingual identities, and not solely use plurilingualism as a scaffold. And educators who claim to use translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes use them only as a scaffold to the dominant language, not grasping its potential. In the United States, translanguaging pedagogies are often used in English-as-a-Second Language programs only as a scaffold. And although the potential for translanguaging is more likely to be found in bilingual education programs, this is also at times elusive. The potential is curtailed, for example, by the strict language allocation policies that have accompanied the growth of dual language education programs in the last decade in the USA, which come close to the neoliberal understanding of multilingualism espoused in the European Union.

It is important to keep the conceptual distinctions between plurilingualism and translanguaging at the forefront as we develop ways of enacting them in practice, even when pedagogies may turn out to look the same. Because the theoretical stance of translanguaging brings forth and affirms dynamic multilingual realities, it offers the potential to transform minoritized communities sense of self that the concept of plurilingualism may not always do. The purpose of translanguaging could be transformative of socio-political and socio-educational structures that legitimize the language hierarchies that exclude minoritized bilingual students and the epistemological understandings that render them invisible. In its theoretical formulation, translanguaging disrupts the concept of named languages and the power hierarchies in which languages are positioned. But the issue for the future is whether school authorities will allow translanguaging to achieve its potential, or whether it will silence it as simply another kind of scaffold. To the degree that educators act on translanguaging with political intent, it will continue to crack some openings and to open opportunities for bilingual students. Otherwise, the present conceptual differences between plurilingualism and translanguaging will be erased.

Source: GARCÍA, Ofelia; OTHEGUY, Ricardo. Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, v. 23, n. 1, p. 17-35, 2020.

Garcia e Otheguy (2020)