Questões de Concursos Inglês

FlexSea’s biodegradable plastics attract £3m investment

01 FlexSea, a startup with its roots at Imperial College London, has announced the completion

02 of a seed round worth £3 million in equity and grants. The investment will help the company

03 commercialize a range of sustainable packaging solutions it has developed, based on plastics

04 derived from seaweed. The aim is to address the catastrophic impact of conventional plastics

05 on the environment, in particular the single-use plastic products that persist in the ocean for

06 many hundreds of years after they are discarded. In contrast, the biodegradable plastics

07 devised by FlexSea will break down in the sea or the soil within a matter of weeks.

08 Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea, first started to think about

09 biodegradable plastics during the COVID pandemic. “I noticed the amount of plastic packaging

10 that was piling up at home, because of the online groceries and other deliveries we relied on

11 at the time, and I just had enough,” he says. He started looking into the biodegradable plastics

12 that were already available, and found that they often had shortcomings. Some didn’t actually

13 break down very rapidly under day-to-day environmental conditions, while others involved

14 unsustainable production methods. For example, plastics derived from seaweed are often made

15 from brown seaweed, which is usually harvested from nature, rather than the commonly

16 cultivated red seaweed. He set out to develop a thin-film plastic from red seaweed. “By the

17 end of lockdown I had the first prototype, a transparent flexi-film, and that is still the backbone

18 technology of our solvent-cast thin films,” he says.

19 FlexSea was set up in 2021 with co-founder Thibaut Monfort-Micheo. Their first home was

20 at Scale Space, on the White City Campus, and they received support from across Imperial's

21 enterprising ecosystem. In 2021 they joined the Centre for Climate Change Innovation’s

22 Greenhouse Accelerator, and in 2022 they took part in Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge,

23 winning the energy and environment track. "FlexSea has the potential to change the pattern

24 of human consumption of plastic and therefore change the sustainability path of our planet,”

25 says Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of lead investor Indico Capital. "This

26 investment will allow us ___ (make) significant progress and penetrate the market effectively,”

27 says Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea.

(Available at: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248154/flexseas-biodegradable-plastics-attract-3m-investment/ – text especially adapted for this test).

Anna Karenina

By Leo Tolstoy - PART ONE - Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

1994, Ramdom House, Inc.

Future of jobs

A survey conducted ______ 1 the World Economic Forum and published in May 2023 reveals that approximately 25% of jobs will ______ 2 significant changes in the next five years.

The report indicates that by 2027, 69 million jobs will be created, while 83 million jobs will be eliminated, resulting in a ______ 3 employment decrease of 2%. The survey incorporates input from over 800 companies that employ more than 11 million workers and utilizes a dataset of 673 million jobs. The report highlights technology and digitalization as the catalysts for both job ______ 4 and destruction.

Secretarial and clerical roles such as bank tellers and cashiers are expected to decline rapidly due to automation, while there will be a growing demand for experts in AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity.

Source (adapted):https://www.newsinlevels.com/products/future-of-jobs-level3/

Future of jobs

A survey conducted ______ 1 the World Economic Forum and published in May 2023 reveals that approximately 25% of jobs will ______ 2 significant changes in the next five years.

The report indicates that by 2027, 69 million jobs will be created, while 83 million jobs will be eliminated, resulting in a ______ 3 employment decrease of 2%. The survey incorporates input from over 800 companies that employ more than 11 million workers and utilizes a dataset of 673 million jobs. The report highlights technology and digitalization as the catalysts for both job ______ 4 and destruction.

Secretarial and clerical roles such as bank tellers and cashiers are expected to decline rapidly due to automation, while there will be a growing demand for experts in AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity.

Source (adapted):https://www.newsinlevels.com/products/future-of-jobs-level3/

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

Fonte: New York Times. Publicado em 10/10/2017. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/ opinion/giving-capitalism-a-social-conscience.html . Acesso em 06/11/2017. [Excerpt]

More than 100 South African gold miners

treated for smoke inhalation

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Hundreds of South African gold mine workers were rescued and over 100 treated for smoke inhalation after an underground fire, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said on Thursday.

Safety is a huge issue in South Africa’s dangerous deep-level mines and a focus for investors. A spate of deaths at SibanyeStillwater’s gold operations, including a seismic event that killed seven miners in early May, has highlighted the risks.

In the latest incident, more than 600 miners were initially trapped after a fire broke out at a mine east of Johannesburg operated by unlisted Gold One, NUM said.

This comes almost two weeks after five miners died in an underground fire at a South African copper mine operated by unlisted Palabora Mining Company in Limpopo.

Company officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

“As the NUM, we vehemently condemn this kind of incident as it is becoming a trend”, the union said in a statement.

(Disponível em:<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-mining-fire/more-than-100-south-african-gold-miners-treated-for-smoke-inhalation-idUSKBN1KG294.)