Questões de Concursos Inglês

The complex linguistic universe of

Game of Thrones

1.Game of Thrones has garnered 38 Emmy

2.awards for its portrayal of a world of sex,

3.violence and politics so real that some viewers

4.could imagine moving there. Part of that detail

5.has been the creation of the richest linguistic

6.universe since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

7.In the field of language-creation for fictional

8.worlds, there is Tolkien, and there is everybody

9.else. But David Peterson, the language-smith

10.of Game of Thrones , comes a close second for

11.the amount of thought put into its two

12.languages, Dothraki and Valyrian. The interest

13.in these tongues is such that a textbook for

14.learning Dothraki has been published, while

15.Duolingo, a popular online language-learning

16.platform, now offers a course in High Valyrian.

17.Inspired by fictional languages such as those

18.in the Star Wars films and with a master’s

19.degree in linguistics, Peterson made Dothraki

20.and Valyrian as rich and realistic as possible.

21.Creating words is the easy part; anyone can

22.string together nonsense syllables. But

23.Peterson, like Tolkien, took the trouble to give

24his words etymologies and cousins, so that

25.the word for “feud” is related to the words

26.“blood” and “fight”. To make the languages

27.pronounceable but clearly foreign, he put

28.non-English sounds in high-frequency words

29.(like khaleesi , or queen), put the stress in

30.typically non-English places, and had words

31.begin with combinations of sounds that are

32.impossible in English, like hr .

33.Armed with a knowledge of common linguistic

34.sound changes, he gives his languages the

35kinds of irregularities and disorder that arise in

36.the real world: High Valyrian’s obar

37(“curve”) becomes Astapori Valyrian’s uvor .

38.Words’ meanings—as in real life—drift, too,

39.giving the system more realistic messiness.

40.Languages also play a prominent role in the

41.storyline. Dothraki is the guttural language of

42.a horse-borne warrior nation, but high-born

43.Daenerys Targaryen does not look down on it;

44.methodically learning it is key to her rise.

45.Tyrion Lannister is left to administer the city

46.of Mereen despite his ropy command of

47.Valyrian, leading to some comic moments.

48.And a prophecy of a future hero acquires new

49.meaning when an interpreter explains that the

50.word in question is ambiguous in Valyrian—it

51.could be “prince” or “princess”.

52.It might seem odd that a highly sexist society

53.like the one of Game of Thrones would have

54.languages where sex roles were not clearly

55.marked, but languages are not always perfect

56.vehicles for a culture. Random change can

57.leave them with too many words for one

58.concept, and not enough for another. In this

59.way, the flawed nature of language reflects

60.the foibles of flawed humans and the

61.imperfect worlds they strive to create.

Adaptado de:

<="" span="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">

21725752-dothraki-and-valyrian-are-mostconvincing-

fictional-tongues-elvish>.

Acesso em: 21 nov. 2017.

Associe as palavras da coluna da esquerda aos seus respectivos sinônimos, na coluna da direita, de acordo com o sentido que têm no texto.

 ( ) garnered (l. 01)

 ( ) look down on (l. 43)

( ) ropy (l. 46)

 ( ) strive (l. 61)

 1. despise 

 2. earned 

 3. old-fashioned

 4. observe

 5. poor

 6. endeavor

 7. celebrated 

 8. aim

The IRS Chief Counsel is appointed by the President of the United States, with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, and serves as the chief legal advisor to the IRS Commissioner on all matters pertaining to the interpretation, administration, and enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code, as well as all other legal matters. Under the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, the Chief Counsel reports to both the IRS Commissioner and the Treasury General Counsel.
Attorneys in the Chief Counsel’s Offce serve as lawyers for the IRS. They provide the IRS and taxpayers with guidance on interpreting Federal tax laws correctly, represent the IRS in litigation, and provide all other legal support required to carry out the IRS mission.
Chief Counsel received 95,929 cases and closed 94,323 cases during fscal year 2012. Of the new cases received, and cases closed, the majority related to tax law enforcement and litigation, including Tax Court litigation; collection, bankruptcy, and summons advice and litigation; Appellate Court litigation; criminal tax; and enforcement advice and assistance.
In Fiscal Year 2012, Chief Counsel received 31,295 Tax Court cases involving taxpayers contesting an IRS determination that they owed additional tax. The total amount of tax and penalty in dispute at the end of the fscal year was almost $6.6 billion.


(Source: Internal Revenue Service Data Book, 2012.)

O texto a seguir é referência para as questões 77 a 80.

Germans make wonderful beer. Yet the productivity of the German beer industry is only 43 percent that of the U.S. beer industry. Meanwhile, the German metalworking and steel industries are equal in productivity to their American counterparts. Since the Germans are evidently capable of organizing industries well, why can?t they do so when it comes to beer?
It turns out that the German beer industry suffers from small?scale production. There are a thousand tiny beer companies in Germany, shielded from competition with one another because each German brewery has virtually a local monopoly, and they are also shielded from competition with imports. The United States has 67 major beer breweries, producing 23 billion liters of beer per year. All of Germany?s 1,000 breweries combined produce only half as much. Thus the average U.S. brewery produces 31 times more beer than the average German brewery.
This fact results from local tastes and German government policies. German beer drinkers are fiercely loyal to their local brand, so there are no national brands in Germany analogous to our Budweiser, Miller, or Coors. Instead, most German beer is consumed within 30 miles of the factory where it is brewed. Therefore, the German beer industry cannot profit from economies of scale. In the beer business, as in other businesses, production costs decrease greatly with scale. The bigger the refrigerating unit for making beer, and the longer the assembly line for filling bottles with beer, the lower the cost of manufacturing beer. Those tiny German beer companies are relatively inefficient. There?s no competition; there are just a thousand local monopolies.
The local beer loyalties of individual German drinkers are reinforced by German laws that make it hard for foreign beers to compete in the German market. The German government has so?called beer purity laws that specify exactly what can go into beer. Not surprisingly, those government purity specifications are based on what German breweries put into beer, and not what American, French, and Swedish breweries like to put into beer. Because of those laws, not much foreign beer gets exported to Germany, and because of inefficiency and high prices much less of that wonderful German beer than you would otherwise expect gets sold abroad. (Before you object that German Löwenbräu beer is widely available in the United States, please read the label on the next bottle of Löwenbräu that you drink here: it?s not produced in Germany but in North America, under license, in big factories with North American productivities and efficiencies of scal(E).

(Diamond, J. ,2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton.)