Questões de Concursos Inglês

Text: “Why do people collect?”

Petra Engels owns 19,571 erasers, Carol Vaughn has 1,221 bars of soap, and Ralf Shrőder has a collection of 14,502 packets of sugar. Many people love to collect things, but why? Psychologists and collectors have different opinions.

The psychologist Carl Jung believed that collecting is part of our ancient human history. Thousands of years ago, humans collected nuts and berries. They kept them carefully and ate them when there was no food. The best collectors survived long cold winters or seasons without rain. Their genes passed to future generations. Nowadays, we still have a collecting instinct.

Historian Philipp Bloom has a different opinion. He thinks collectors want to make something that will remain after their death. By bringing many similar items together, the collector gains historical importance. Sometimes their collections become museums or libraries, for example, Henry Huntington, who founded a library in Los Angeles to house his collection of books.

Author Steve Roach thinks that people collect things to remember their childhood. Many children collect things, but few have enough money to buy the things they really want, and they lose interest. In later life, they remember their collections fondly. Now, they have enough money and opportunity to find special items, and they start collecting again. This way, they can re-live and enjoy their childhood years.

Art collector, Werner Muensterberger, agrees that collecting is linked to childhood. But he believes we collect in order to feel safe and secure. While babies hold blankets or toys to feel safe when their mother isn’t there, adults collect things to stop feeling lonely or anxious.

Autograph collector Mark Baker agrees that collecting is emotional, but he doesn’t collect to reduce anxiety. “For me, it’s the excitement,” he says. “I love trying to get a famous person’s autograph. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail. Also, by collecting autographs, I feel connected to famous people. I don’t just watch them on television. I actually meet them.”

These are just a few reasons for collecting. Do you know any people with collections? Why do they collect?

Questions related to the text above

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder às questões de 1 a 4.

A doll to place your dreams on...

(1º§) "Someday I'm gonna be, exactly like you... till then... I'll make believe I'm you." So went the dulcet tones of Barbie's first ever TV advert in 1959. That year, what would come to be toy company Mattel's most significant and long-lasting creation, Barbie, arrived.

(2º§) She was the brainchild of Ruth Handler; the co-founder, along with her husband Eliot, of Mattel in 1945. According to one of two origin stories (the other involving an adult novelty doll called Bild Lilli, handed out at bachelor parties), Handler noticed her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls and decided she wanted to give her a doll that was not a baby, but a woman she could aspire to. Barbie, named after her daughter, was born and she premiered at the annual Toy Fair in New York in March 1959. In the first year, 300,000 Barbie dolls were sold.

(3º§) She was 'petite' as the advert chimes, with all the latest clothes and accessories. Among these was, of course, a wedding dress. Her immediate MO was clearly as a stylish and sophisticated style maven, the kind of svelte, pretty woman young girls wanted to be − at least in 1959. Her first ever outfit − as exemplified in Gerwig's initial teaser trailer for the Barbie movie − was a black and white swimsuit, with white heels and white-rimmed sunglasses. Unsurprisingly, by 1961, she was 'going steady' with Ken (oddly named after the Handlers' son).

Courting controversy

(4º§) By the 1960s, Barbie was already attracting criticism for being a 'sex symbol'. To counteract this, the Handlers gave her a little sister, Skipper (originally a child and now sold as a teenager), and a best friend, Midge − who would go to have her own chequered history. Fashioned as a 'homelier' friend for Barbie (with red hair and freckles) Midge would disappear after 1967, returning in the 1980s along with a husband, kids and a 'Happy Family Line' of toys, which even included Pregnant Midge (with a detachable womb!). The line courted scandal from every angle − among which was outrage that Midge was pregnant without a wedding ring. Cannily, Gerwig has lined up Emerald Fennell to play Midge. Yes, Pregnant Midge.

(5º§) Though to many Barbie was too conventional − with her improbable proportions and origins as a doll who aspires to, essentially, marry Ken − to many she was too progressive. Indeed, as early as 1968, nine years after Barbie's invention, Mattel introduced their first Black doll, Christie, a friend of Barbie. Christie arrived at a fecund point in American politics, just as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 − enshrining the illegality of racial discrimination − was passed.

(6º§) It would not be until 1980, however, that Mattel would produce its first Black Barbie. She was designed by Kitty Black Perkins, who was then chief designer for Barbie. She bought her first Barbie doll aged 28, when interviewing for the position, when she was asked to create a whole new wardrobe for the doll. She was chief designer for more than 30 years and, in 1979, she was asked to design the first ever Black Barbie. When she arrived, she was wearing a red disco jumpsuit and came with the tagline: "She's Black! She's beautiful! She's dynamite!"

(adapted) https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/entertainment/a44129282/

Plurilingualism and translanguaging: commonalities and divergences

Both plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices in the education of language minoritized students remain controversial, for schools have a monolingual and monoglossic tradition that is hard to disrupt, even when the disrupting stance brings success to learners. At issue is the national identity that schools are supposed to develop in their students, and the Eurocentric system of knowledge, circulated through standardized named languages, that continues to impose what Quijano (2000) has called a coloniality of power.

All theories emerge from a place, an experience, a time, and a position, and in this case, plurilingualism and translanguaging have developed, as we have seen, from different loci of enunciation. But concepts do not remain static in a time and place, as educators and researchers take them up, as they travel, and as educators develop alternative practices. Thus, plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes look the same, and sometimes they even have the same practical goals. For example, educators who say they use plurilingual pedagogical practices might insist on developing bilingual identities, and not solely use plurilingualism as a scaffold. And educators who claim to use translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes use them only as a scaffold to the dominant language, not grasping its potential. In the United States, translanguaging pedagogies are often used in English-as-a-Second Language programs only as a scaffold. And although the potential for translanguaging is more likely to be found in bilingual education programs, this is also at times elusive. The potential is curtailed, for example, by the strict language allocation policies that have accompanied the growth of dual language education programs in the last decade in the USA, which come close to the neoliberal understanding of multilingualism espoused in the European Union.

It is important to keep the conceptual distinctions between plurilingualism and translanguaging at the forefront as we develop ways of enacting them in practice, even when pedagogies may turn out to look the same. Because the theoretical stance of translanguaging brings forth and affirms dynamic multilingual realities, it offers the potential to transform minoritized communities sense of self that the concept of plurilingualism may not always do. The purpose of translanguaging could be transformative of socio-political and socio-educational structures that legitimize the language hierarchies that exclude minoritized bilingual students and the epistemological understandings that render them invisible. In its theoretical formulation, translanguaging disrupts the concept of named languages and the power hierarchies in which languages are positioned. But the issue for the future is whether school authorities will allow translanguaging to achieve its potential, or whether it will silence it as simply another kind of scaffold. To the degree that educators act on translanguaging with political intent, it will continue to crack some openings and to open opportunities for bilingual students. Otherwise, the present conceptual differences between plurilingualism and translanguaging will be erased.

Source: GARCÍA, Ofelia; OTHEGUY, Ricardo. Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, v. 23, n. 1, p. 17-35, 2020.

Garcia e Otheguy (2020)