Questões de Concursos Inglês

Since 2000 when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a global academic benchmark for measuring student outcomes by testing 15-year-olds, many global education systems have been impacted by what sometimes looks and feels like a race to rank high.
When the OECD launched the Programme for International Student Assessment — PISA — the idea was to enable countries to make cross-national comparisons of student achievement using a common/standard metric to increase human capital. In other words, higher academic achievement should corelate with earnings in the future and a country’s standard of living. As PISA states, it publishes the results of the test a year after the students are tested to help governments shape their education policies.
As PISA has developed, through seven global testing rounds every three years, with the first in 2000 and the most recent in 2018, for some it has gained a reputation as the “Olympics of education” given the widespread attention that country rankings receive following the release of results.
Now, partly in the face of criticisms, PISA is looking at expanding how and what it tests. As this process unfolds, policy-makers must remember that the social consequences of a test are just as important as the test’s content. Putting a new face on PISA will undoubtedly present various opportunities and challenges.
To date, PISA has been restricted to what is generally called the “cognitive” side of learning, focusing on reading, mathematics and scientific literacy. In addition to test questions, students and school principals fill out questionnaires to provide contextual information on student and school environment characteristics that can be associated with more or less favourable performance.
Countries that excel in PISA tests, such as Finland, a country with less than six million people, have become regarded by policy-makers as a “global reference society” — an ideal to aspire to — due to their high performance in PISA rankings.
Asian countries or jurisdictions like Singapore, Hong Kong (China) and Japan tend to consistently achieve exceptional PISA performances and hence get a lot of attention from other countries wishing to emulate their success via borrowing policy. For example, England flew teachers out to China to study mathematics teaching.
In the next administration in 2021, PISA will tackle creative thinking, trying to find ways to assess, and have students assess, flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity such as being inquisitive and persistent. The PISA team is also developing a way of testing students’ digital learning, which should be ready in time for the 2024 assessment.
However, it should be remembered that education policies from high achieving nations don’t migrate across international boundaries without consideration given to national and cultural contexts. Rather, innovations and changes in education require teachers to have the time and opportunity to re-educate themselves in relation to more recent insights in what it means to get the best out of children.

The OECD will need to respond to previous critiques and provide greater transparency around newer test instruments and the choices made to arrive at rankings. The latter is no small challenge since the future focus of PISA is based on topics which seem more difficult to evaluate than math, science or reading skills.

A rehabilitation programme for violent men in Espírito Santo is cutting reoffending rates In the state of Espírito Santo, violence against women is rampant. From 2005 to 2012, the state had the highest rate of murders of women in the country. In the years since, it has been in the top five. Nationwide, almost a third of girls and women said in a 2017 survey that they had suffered violence -– ranging from threats and beatings to attempted murder – during the previous year.

The problem permeates all levels of society and it is a huge challenge, says Gracimeri Gaviorno, chief officer of the civil police in Espírito Santo. Gaviorno saw many men reoffend while they waited -– in some cases for years — for their trial, so she decided to do something about it. “You can’t just wait with your arms folded while the justice system takes its time to do something,” she says. In 2016, she worked with psychologists, social workers and other police departments to develop the Homem que é Homem programme to rehabilitate aggressive men.

The programme is voluntary and offered to all men who come into contact with the police for violence against women. For those who complete it, there is no reduction in sentencing, but it can be presented to the judge as a kind of character witness. There are seven courses a year, with four 90-minute sessions a week for five weeks. Everyone arrested for violence against women must attend an introductory lecture.

Ana Paula Milani, a police psychologist involved in running the programme, says: “I start off explaining that hitting a woman isn’t normal and is a crime, and that there is a programme to help them. The majority of men don’t know why they are there, and even after my lecture, some still think it was the woman’s fault.” For every course, around 60 men will come to the first lecture; around 20 agree to participate in the programme and 15 complete it.

Group sessions are run like an AA group. Participants sit in a circle and discussions revolve around gender roles in society. They examine the concept of masculinity -– machismo is rife in Brazil -– and talk about why men are more likely to take drugs and why the male suicide rate is higher. They then discuss how to manage and resolve conflict without resorting to violence. The last meeting is about how to return to having a relationship and how to regain trust. The programme, run by police professionals, has been successful. In its first year, 6% of attendees reoffended; the number fell to 3% in its second year and in 2017, when 73 men completed the course, 2% reoffended. The project has been replicated in three other areas of the state, and there are plans to launch it in two other municipalities.

Gaviorno, who was a finalist in the first awards in Brazil to recognise outstanding contributions to the public sector, is aware that the project plays only a small part in tackling violence against women, which she says continues to be “a huge challenge”. “From the female lawyer who asks for something from the judge and gets it because she is pretty, to the woman who is murdered by her husband, there are a lot of layers of sexism in Brazil,” she says. Until this changes, Gaviorno and her colleagues will have their work cut out.

(Adaptado de: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/hitting-women-isnt-normal-tackling-male-violence-brazil. Acesso em: 19 jul. 2018.)

Bermuda Triangle in the last 500 years, over 1000 ships and aircraft have entered the Bermuda Triangle and mysteriously vanished. It is the deadliest place on Earth for planes and boats. The Bermuda Triangle is an area of water about 500,000 square miles in size. One tip of the triangle starts from Miami, Florida and extends northeast towards the island of Bermuda. The next side of the triangle then runs straight south towards the Puerto Rico and then turns back northeast up to Florida.

The story of Flight 19 is one of the most incredible cases of Bermuda Triangle disappearances. In the early afternoon of December 5, 1945, five American military aircraft with 14 men aboard departed from a naval base in Florida on a training flight. These aircraft were called Avengers, and they were among the sturdiest and most reliable aircraft in the world at the time. Commander Charles Taylor, an experienced pilot, was supposed to lead the flight east from the Florida coastline, which would take them into the Bermuda Triangle. The sky was clear, and it was a perfect day for flying but problems began about 90 minutes after takeoff.

Taylor radioed back to his base at 3:40 p.m. that he was lost, and his plane’s compass was not working. This should not have been a problem as the normal procedure for going home was to simply fly west until they returned to the U.S. coast. the men of Flight 19, however, never returned home and the airplanes seemed to have simply vanished. The final radio messages from Flight 19 were very odd. One pilot stated, “Everything looks strange. Even the ocean.” Another one said, “It looks like we’re entering white water. We’re completely lost.” A rescue plane flew into the Bermuda Triangle to try and find the men, but it crashed and all 13 men on board were killed. Later on, a Navy official stated that Flight 19 “flew off to Mars.”

Flight 19’s disappearance is just one of many in the long history of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Is there a scientific explanation for these disappearances or are there supernatural forces at work in the area? The number of unanswered questions about the fate of the planes only adds to the mystery. Did Taylor, an experienced pilot, really make a simple navigational mistake? If so, why didn’t any of the other men in his flight see the error and correct it? Why has the wreckage of the planes and the men’s bodies never been found after all these years? The US Navy investigated the incident in 1946 and reported that the Flight 19 incident was a “disappearance” with the chilling words “cause unknown” added later on.

One of the principles of all learning is that we make sense of new information and ideas by relating them to our previous knowledge. There are two main kinds of previous language knowledge which second language learners can use in order to make sense of the new language they encounter: the first is their knowledge of their mother tongue and the second is the knowledge they already possess about the second language itself.

Every text is organized within a specific genre according to its communicative purposes, as part of the conditions of discourse production, which generate social uses that determine any and every text. Genres are, therefore, historically determined, and constitute relatively stable forms of utterances available in a culture. (National Curriculum Parameters, Brasil, 1988, p.21) (adaptado) Answer the two questions below considering also texts "Second Language Learning" and "National Curriculum Parameters", above.

Read the text below and answer the following question.

The official object that defines the mass of a kilogram is a tiny, 139-year-old cylinder of platinum and iridium that resides in a triple-locked vault near Paris. Because it is so important, scientists almost never take it out; instead they use copies called working standards. But the last time they did inspect the real kilogram, they found it is roughly five parts in 100 million heavier than all the working standards, which have been leaving behind a few atoms of metal every time they are put on scales. This is one of the reasons the kilogram may soon be redefined not by a physical object but through calculations based on fundamental constants.

“This [shrinking] is the kind of thing that happens when you have an object that needs to be conserved in order to have a standard,” says Peter Mohr, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who serves on the committee that oversees the International System of Units (SI). “Fundamental constants, on the other hand, are not going to change over time.”

The redefinition of the kilogram will be part of a planned larger overhaul to make SI units fully dependent on constants of nature. Representatives from 57 countries will vote on the proposed change this month at a conference in Versailles, France, and the new rules are expected to pass.

What will happen to the old kilogram artifacts after the redefinition? Rather than packing them off to museums, scientists plan to keep studying how they fare over time. “There is so much measurement history on these,” says physicist Stephan Schlamminger of NIST. “It would be irresponsible to not continue to measure them.”

Adaptado de:<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/redefining-thekilogram/> Acessado em 10 de outubro de 2018.

View from the Rio favelas: 'We're often scared to leave the house in case we're hit by a stray bullet'

A year has gone by since the Olympic Games. Only 147 of those 365 days ended without the residents of Complexo do Alemão hearing gunshots. After the promises of hope and the Games’ legacy of peace, 218 days were accompanied by a soundtrack of gunfire.

On 218 days we were afraid we wouldn’t make it home alive; we were scared to leave the house in case we were hit by a stray bullet; on 218 days we were afraid that the walls of our homes might be hit. To pretend that we were not in a war zone, the military police painted their armoured military tanks – popularly called caveirão, or “big skull” – white.

For a long time I’ve wondered about the reason for the conflict and danger in the favelas of Rio, the same places that hold so much shared affection, culture, art and memory.

Since the Olympics, residents of the Complexo do Alemão have been afraid of organising a cultural event in the neighbourhood square, or of people gathering outside because an intense shootout might happen without prior notice, with no chance to find protection. It has been 218 days of fear.

All eyes – and investments – were turned to Brazil when it hosted, over 10 years, three mega sporting events. But the country has failed to keep its promises of peace after the 2007 Pan-American Games, the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.

Before the Olympics, the state was completely absent in the favela. Back then we had no cable car – now we do, but it doesn’t work. We did not have family clinics – now we do, but without medical care. There were no police – now there are, and we live with daily shootings. What have the poorest received as a result of the Games? On television, I see only news of corruption.

Brazil is at war, some say. A war on the poor, justified by drugs. A war that justifies, for many (but not for me) the presence of the Brazilian army in the streets of the city. The beauty of Rio’s natural landscapes contrasts with the conflict of our daily lives, militarised by the government.

We need to talk about the relationship between violence and drugs. Young people from different favelas are now coming together to think about strategies that we hope can feed into public policies on drugs in Brazil. The #Movimentos movement – which runs discussions and seminars for young people – was created because it isn’t possible to deal with the drugs issue without the input of those who live with the consequences of failed policies.

As other countries move towards resolving the issue in a serious way, investing in research and prevention mechanisms in public health services, Brazil invests in more weapons and repression that result in an increase of death and incarceration – particularly among people who are poor, black, young and living in favelas.

But despite all the fear, all the chaos, we continue to conquer the world, occupying the spaces that we have been historically denied. The Coletivo Papo Reto (Straight Talk Collective) has created a calendar that celebrates the good news and achievements of the people who live in Complexo do Alemão. Many people may not understand what it is that motivates us in the midst of this chaos and fear. I don’t know either – but I feel that I must keep going.

(Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/19/rio-voices-view-from-the-favelas-olympics-they-

promised-a-legacy-of-peace-but-brazil-is-now-at-war. Access on 22/8/2017)

The Moodbeam wristband, resembling a fitness tracker, is designed to help employers monitor the emotional well-being of remote workers. The device features two buttons: yellow for happy and blue for sad, allowing employees to log their feelings throughout the workweek. Managers can then access this data via an online dashboard, gaining insights into their team’s emotional state. Originally created by co-founder Christina Colmer McHugh to help her daughter communicate feelings, Moodbeam aims to bridge the gap left by in-person interactions, giving employers a way to “check in” with staff working from home.

One user of the Moodbeam wristband, the UK charity Brave Mind, has found it helpful. Trustee Paddy Burtt noted that an employee’s struggle with workload and disillusionment only came to light through the data, underscoring the device’s potential to surface unseen issues. With mental health issues like anxiety and depression costing the global economy approximately $ 1 trillion annually in lost productivity, tools like Moodbeam are gaining traction. Studies indicate a growing need for mental health support, especially as remote work and blurred work-life boundaries exacerbate stress.

Other companies are also exploring solutions. In San Francisco, Modern Health connects employees to mental health resources, including therapy and meditation, based on a brief questionnaire. Similarly, Microsoft has developed a “virtual commute” feature within Teams, prompting users to reflect on their day and their schedule tasks, and to meditate to help distinguish between work and personal time. As more people work remotely, these innovations aim to provide accessible support for mental resilience and emotional well-being.

Internet:<bbc.com> (adapted).