Questões de Concursos Inglês

Judge the following items about the ideas and the linguistic structures
of the text above.

Read the text below to answer questions 13–15.

Margarine vs. butter: are synthetic spreads toast?

Sales of margarine are in decline, due to a combination of reformulated recipes, price, health and taste. Do you defend margarine, or is butter simply better?
Butter vs. margarine: it?s a fight that has gone on for decades. On one side, there?s butter — rich, creamy, defiantly full–fat and made for millennia by churning the milk or cream from cattle. On the other, there?s margarine: the arriviste spread invented in the 1860s. It might not taste delicious, and it doesn?t sink into your toast like butter, but for decades margarine has ridden a wave of success as the "healthy" alternative.
No longer. Sales of margarine have plummeted in the last year, according to Kantar, with "health" spreads dropping 7.4% in sales. Flora has been particularly badly hit, losing £24m in sales, partly due to reformulating its recipe.
Meanwhile, butter is back in vogue. Brits bought 8.7% more blocks of butter last year, and 6% more spreadable tubs. This is partly due to the "narrowing price gap between butter and margarine", Tim Eales of IRI told The Grocer, but also to the home baking revival led by Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood and co. We?re all sticking unsalted butter in our sponges these days.
A yen for natural, unprocessed produce could also be a factor. "Since all the food scandals of the last 10 years, people are thinking about where their food comes from — butter is perceived as ?pure?", says food writer Signe Johansen. But is margarine really out for the count? Big brands are owned by powerful multinationals such as Unilever, with huge marketing budgets. Don?t rule spreads out just yet.
Margarine was invented in 1869 by a French food scientist, Hippolyte Mège–Mouriès, who responded to a challenge by Napoleon III. Napoleon wanted to find a long–life alternative to butter to feed troops in the Franco–Prussian war. Mège–Mouriès mixed skimmed milk, water and beef fat to create a substance similar to butter in texture, if not in taste. He called it "oleomargarine" after margarites, the Greek word for pearls — a reference to its pearly sheen. In 1871 he sold the patent to Jurgens, a Dutch firm now part of Unilever.
Beef fat was soon replaced by cheaper hydrogenated and non–hydrogenated vegetable oils. "Margarine gained a foothold during the first world war", says food writer and historian Bee Wilson. "George Orwell wrote of the ?great war? that what he remembered most was not all the deaths but all the margarine. But at this stage people recognized it was an inferior substitute for butter: an ersatz food, like drinking chicory instead of coffee."
In the second world war, British margarine brands were legally required to add vitamins to their recipes. "The move in status to margarine as a health food, marketing itself as a superior alternative, happened after the war", says Wilson. Added "healthy" extras — vitamins, omega–3s, unpronounceables that lower your cholesterol — are still a mainstay of the market.
But while margarine has spent decades fighting butter on the health front, what about taste? "Margarine has never been able to replicate the flavour of true butter", says Johansen. This despite the fact many brands add milk and cream to their spreads. "I Can?t Believe It?s Not Butter"? Really? I can.
Unsurprisingly, it?s hard to find a defendant of margarine among food writers and chefs. One of the few exceptions is Marguerite Patten, who is a fan of baking with Stork® . Indeed, Stork® does make for wonderfully crisp shortcrust pastry.
Margarine has taken a bashing on the health front in recent years, too. Negative press about trans fats in the 00s saw many brands remove hydrogenated fats from their spreads and reformulate their recipes. Growing suspicion of processed foods has led many consumers to return to butter. As Johansen puts it: "If you want a healthy heart, eat more vegetables."
And yet, and yet. I?m looking at a tub of Pure Dairy–Free Soya Spread. It contains 14g saturated fat per 100g, compared to butter?s 54%. For many consumers, such stats still outweigh taste when it comes to deciding what?s on their toast. And what about vegans, and those with lactose intolerance? Margarine can fulfill needs that butter can?t.
It will never win any taste awards, but there is still a place for margarine on the supermarket shelves — even if there isn?t one for it in most food lovers? fridges.
Margarine vs. butter: are synthetic spreads toast? Adapted. Available in:http://www.guardian.co.uk

Teaching English in the Brazilian countryside

      “In Brazil, countryside youth want to learn about new places, new cultures and people. However, they think their everyday lives are an obstacle to that, because they imagine that country life has nothing to do with other parts of the world”, says Rafael Fonseca. Rafael teaches English in a language school in a cooperative coffee cultivation in Paraguaçu. His learners are the children of rural workers.
      Rafael tells us that the objective of the project being developed in the cooperative is to give the young people more opportunities of growth in the countryside, and that includes the ability to communicate with international buyers. “In the future, our project may help overcome the lack of succession in countryside activities because, nowadays, rural workers’ children become lawyers, engineers, teachers, and sometimes even doctors, but those children very rarely want to have a profession related to rural work”, says Rafael.
      “That happens”, he adds, “because their parents understand that life in the countryside can be hard work and they do not want to see their children running the same type of life that they have. Their children also believe that life in the country does not allow them to have contact with other parts of the world, meet other people and improve cultural bounds. The program intends to show them that by means of a second language they can travel, communicate with new people and learn about new cultures as a means of promoting and selling what they produce in the country, and that includes receiving visitors in their workplace from abroad.”
      Rafael’s strategy is to contextualize the English language and keep learners up-to-date with what happens in the global market. “Integrating relevant topics about countryside living can be transformative in the classroom. The local regional and cultural aspects are a great source of inspiration and learning not only for the young, but for us all.”

Adapted from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2019/01/21/teaching-english-in-the-brazilian-classroom/

Lockdown Named 2020’s Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary

Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. Lockdown is defined by Collins as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”. The 4.5-billion-word Collins Corpus, which contains written material from websites, books and newspapers, as well as spoken material from radio, television and conversations, registered a 6,000% increase in ______(1) usage. In 2019, there were 4,000 recorded instances of lockdown being used. In 2020, this had risen to more than a quarter of a million.

“Language is a reflection of the world around us and 2020 has been dominated by the global pandemic,” says Collins language content consultant Helen Newstead. “We have chosen lockdown as _______(2) word of the year because it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict _______(3) daily lives in order to contain the virus. Lockdown has affected the way we work, study, shop, and socialise. It is not a word of the year to celebrate, but it is, perhaps, one that sums up the year for most of the world.”

Other pandemic-related words such as coronavirus, social distancing and key worker were on the dictionary’s list of the top 10 words. However, the coronavirus crisis didn’t completely dominate this year’s vocabulary: words like “Megxit,” a term to describe Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepping back as senior members of the royal family, also made the shortlist along with “TikToker” (a person who regularly shares or appears in videos on TikTok), and “BLM.” The abbreviation BLM, for Black Lives Matter is defined by Collins as “a movement that campaigns against racially motivated violence and oppression”, it registered a 581% increase in usage.

Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/10/lockdown-named-word-of-the-year-by-collins-dictionary