Questões de Concursos Inglês

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There is nothing conventional about 17-year-old Michael Fuller’s relationship with music. As someone with high-functioning autism who sees the world through sound, creating melodies from the bustle of the high street or trains on the tracks feels more natural than any social interaction. This hardwired connection to sound has been with him for as long as he can remember.

By the age of 11, Michael could play Mozart by ear, having taught himself to play the piano through a mobile phone app. The app highlighted notes on a keyboard as classical music played. He describes his unusual musical talent as “downloading” music into his head. His mother, Nadine, remembers that as a child Michael would “suddenly pop up and say: ‘I’ve got a symphony’”. Michael took to the piano and found he could quickly perform complex pieces from memory.

“I liked what I was hearing, sought more music and began studying through Google and YouTube,” he remembers. “It was very organic. I would listen in great depth and the music would be implanted in my mind. I could then just play it on the piano – all without being taught.”

Growing up in a family that listened to reggae over classical music, Michael feels “very much aware” of how different his approach is to music – symbolised by the way he taught himself piano as a child. This, his mother says, came as a “surprise to the family and myself – I’d never listened to classical music in my life”.

It was not long after learning to play the piano that Michael started composing his own works. Describing this process as “making music with my mind”, Michael says composing classical symphonies “helps me to express myself through music – it makes me calm”. Michael wants to nurture his song writing to achieve his ambition of becoming a modern mainstream classical artist. He wants to control the creative process, unlike typical modern-day composers, who he says “write blobs on a page, hand it over to the musicians – then say bye-bye and stay in the background and get no recognition”. Instead, Michael is determined to take centre stage.

(Alex Taylor. www.bbc.com, 27.03.2018. Adaptado.)

T E X T

Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment.

Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work.

The coronavirus upended the lives of millions of college students. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that men have been hit particularly hard — accounting for roughly three-fourths of pandemic-driven dropouts — and depicted an accelerating crisis in male enrollment.

A closer look at historical trends and the labor market reveals a more complex picture, one in which women keep playing catch-up in an economy structured to favor men.

In many ways, the college gender imbalance is not new. Women have outnumbered men on campus since the late 1970s. The ratio of female to male undergraduates increased much more from 1970 to 1980 than from 1980 to the present. And the numbers haven’t changed much in recent decades. In 1992, 55 percent of college students were women. By 2019, the number had nudged up to 57.4 percent.

While the shift in the college gender ratio is often characterized as men “falling behind,” men are actually more likely to go to college today than they were when they were the majority, many decades ago. In 1970, 32 percent of men 18 to 24were enrolled in college, a level that was most likely inflated by the opportunity to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. That percentage dropped to 24 percent in 1978 and then steadily grew to a stable 37 percent to 39 percent over the last decade.

The gender ratio mostly changed because female enrollment increased even faster, more than doubling over the last half-century.

Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported. Generally, admissions officials prefer to limit the disparity to 55 percent female and 45 percent male. Their reason not to let the gender ratio drift further toward 2 to 1 is straightforward: Such a ratio would most likely cause a decrease in applications.

In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: “Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”

The raw numbers don’t take into account the varying value of college degrees. Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the professors in those fields remain overwhelmingly male.

Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don’t pay well.

The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.

None of this diminishes the significance of the male decrease in college enrollment and graduation. Educators view the male-driven dive in community college enrollment over the last 18 months as a calamity. The pandemic confirmed what was already known. Higher socioeconomic classes are deeply embedded in college and will bear considerable cost and inconvenience to stay there, even if it means watching lectures on a laptop in the room above your parent’s garage and missing a season of parties and football games.

For other people, college attendance is far more fragile. It does not define their identities and is not as important as earning a steady paycheck or starting and nurturing a family. In a time of crisis,it can be delayed — but the reality is that people who drop out of college are statistically unlikely to complete a degree.

Last year, women were less likely than men to leave community college, despite their disproportionate responsibility for caregiving and domestic work, because they no doubt understood the bleak long-term job prospects for women without a credential.

www.nytimes.com/Sept.9,2021

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It happens that the publication of this edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary comes 250 years after the appearance of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, compiled by Samuel Johnson. Much has changed since then. The English that Johnson described in 1755 was relatively well defined, still essentially the national property of the British. Since then, it has dispersed and diversified, has been adopted and adapted as an international means of communication by communities all over the globe. English is now the name given to an immensely diverse variety of different usages. This obviously poses a problem of selection for the dictionary maker: which words are to be included in a dictionary, and thus granted recognition as more centrally or essentially English than the words that are left out?

Johnson did not have to deal with such diversity, but he too was exercised with this question. In his Plan of an English Dictionary, published in 1747, he considers which words it is proper to include in his dictionary; whether ‘terms of particular professions’, for example, were eligible, particularly since many of them had been derived from other languages. ‘Of such words,’ he says, ‘all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language, for some of them are naturalized and incorporated, but others still continue aliens...’. Which words are deemed to be sufficiently naturalized or incorporated to count as ‘parts of our language’, ‘real’ or proper English, and thus worthy of inclusion in a dictionary of the language, remains, of course, a controversial matter. Interestingly enough, even for Johnson the status of a word in the language was not the only, nor indeed the most important consideration. For being alien did not itself disqualify words from inclusion; in a remark which has considerable current resonance he adds: ‘some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchaser of the dictionary will expect to find them’. And, crucially, the expectations that people have of a dictionary are based on what they want to use it for. What Johnson says of his own dictionary would apply very aptly to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD): ‘The value of a work must be estimated by its use: It is not enough that a dictionary delights the critic, unless at the same time it instructs the learner...’.

(Widdowson, H. Hornby, A.S. 2010. Adaptado)

For question, consider the following collocation: “Congratulations on” and choose the best-suited alternatives.