Questões de Concursos

filtre e encontre questões para seus estudos.

Read text II and answer questions 37 to 40.

TEXT II



If you think that theres something oddly familiar about
descriptions of social media, it may be that you recall some of
the discussions in the 1990s about what the web would
become. And many of its emerging manifestations are close to
the idealistic imaginings from that time. A good way to think
about social media is that all of this is actually just about being
human beings. Sharing ideas, cooperating and collaborating to
create art, thinking and commerce, vigorous debate and
discourse, finding people who might be good friends, allies and
lovers its what our species has built several civilisations on.
Thats why it is spreading so quickly, not because its great
shiny, whizzy new technology, but because it lets us be
ourselves only more so. And it is in the more so that the
power of this revolution lies. People can find information,
inspiration, like-minded people,communities and collaborators
faster than ever before. New ideas, services, business models
and technologies emerge and evolve at dizzying speed in social
media.

(http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads}
/eBooks/What_is_social_media_Nov_2007.pdf
 

The text opens with

Leia o texto a seguir para responder à próxima questão.

AI has made it easier than ever to find information: Ask ChatGPT almost anything, and the system swiftly delivers an answer. But the large language models that power popular tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude were not designed to be accurate or factual. They regularly “hallucinate” and offer up falsehoods as if they were hard facts.

Yet people are relying more and more on AI to answer their questions. Half of all people in the U.S. between the ages of 14 and 22 now use AI to get information, according to a 2024 Harvard study.


https://theconversation.com/heres-how-researchers-are-helping-ais-gettheir-facts-straight-245463
The word “Yet”, in the beginning of the second paragraph, is polysemic and its meaning depends on the context. In the sentences below, the one in which the word carries the same meaning as the one used in the text is
Leia o texto e responda à próxima questão.


Powerful storm knocks out power to 1.4 million homes in Brazil’s largest city


SAO PAULO (AP) — Around 1.4 million households in Sao Paulo, Brazil, were without power on Saturday almost 24 hours after a brief but powerful storm swept through South America’s largest metropolis. At least seven people were killed.


Officials in Sao Paulo state said that record winds of up to 67 mph (108 kph) knocked down transmission lines and destroyed trees, causing severe damage in some parts. The storm also shut down several airports and interrupted water service in several areas, according to the state government.


Authorities originally expected to restore power within a few hours. But several neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, which is home to 21 million people, were still in the dark on Saturday, and authorities were urging residents to limit their consumption of water.


https://apnews.com. Adaptado. Acesso em 24.04.2025
While preparing reading comprehension exercises on the text, the teacher notes the absolute predominance of verbs in the simple past. However, this is not a language class, but a reading one, and the teacher wouldn’t like to deal with the topic “verbs” in isolation, as followers of structuralism would do. This way, in trying to articulate reading comprehension and linguistic knowledge, in a class on the text “Powerful storm knocks out power to 1.4 million homes in Brazil’s largest city”, the teacher

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

In the first line, the poet reveals that her dreams have become
READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTION


The importance of assessing the social and economic impacts of environmental policies


Policymakers face the challenge of supporting both inclusive and sustainable economic development and a healthy environment. While the most desirable policy outcome is one that achieves the greatest environmental benefits while also advancing socioeconomic goals, it is important for policymakers to fully understand the possible trade-offs between these objectives. A better understanding of the broader impacts of environmental policies is crucial to mitigate their adverse effects on competing goals, especially as countries are faced with the arduous task of responding to mounting environmental challenges in economically turbulent times.


Governments are under pressure to scale up and accelerate their ambition on climate and environmental goals. But in taking such action forward, they have to carefully navigate a number of headwinds. These include the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on both the economy and society, cost-of-living crisis, political tensions and geopolitical crises such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Low-income people and the poorest economies are the hardest hit, primarily due to the steep increases in the price of energy and food.


The level of environmental policy stringency can have an impact on a variety of policy outcomes. Empirical research is crucial to shed light on these interlinkages. Previous research has shown that more stringent environmental policy has achieved significant environmental benefits with little aggregate effect on economic performance. However, localized effects may generate winners and losers, with significant losses for certain sectors, firms or individuals and benefits for others. Nonetheless, at present, the empirical evidence on these distributional aspects is still scarce, despite its crucial role in supporting good policy design. More than ever, regulators need better tools and insights to assess the consequences of environmental policies on the economy and on social outcomes.


Adapted from the brochure downloaded from https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/social-and-economic-impacts-ofenvironmental-policies.html
“However” in “However, localised effects may generate winners and losers” (3rd paragraph) introduces a(n):
Read Text II and answer the five questions that follow it


Text II

OpenAI’s GPT-4 Scores in the Top 1% of Creative Thinking

By Erik Guzik

Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines. Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.

New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic—as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers’ strike.

And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity—along with examples of both its promise and peril—is likely just beginning.

When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal, or problem by generating something new—a product or solution that didn’t previously exist.

In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources — ideas, materials, knowledge — in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something the creator did not — and perhaps could not — foresee.

Our results?

GPT-4 scored in the top 1 percent of test-takers for the originality of its ideas. From our research, we believe this marks one of the first examples of AI meeting or exceeding the human ability for original thinking.

In short, we believe that AI models like GPT-4 are capable of producing ideas that people see as unexpected, novel, and unique. Other researchers are arriving at similar conclusions in their research of AI and creativity.

Adapted from https://singularityhub.com/2023/09/10/openais-gpt-4-scores-in-thetop-1-of-creative-thinking/
When the author informs that some have started to win awards for their creative output (2nd paragraph), he reveals that creative tools are being

READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER THE QUESTION:



Chatbots could be used to steal data, says cybersecurity agency


The UK’s cybersecurity agency has warned that there is an increasing risk that chatbots could be manipulated by hackers.


The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said that individuals could manipulate the prompts of chatbots, which run on artificial intelligence by creating a language model and give answers to questions by users, through “prompt injection” attacks that would make them behave in an unintended manner.


The point of a chatbot is to mimic human-like conversations, which it has been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data. Commonly used in online banking or online shopping, chatbots are generally designed to handle simple requests.


Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI chatbot Bard, are trained using data that generates human-like responses to user prompts. Since chatbots are used to pass data to third-party applications and services, the NCSC has said that risks from malicious “prompt injection” will grow.


For instance, if a user inputs a statement or question that a language model is not familiar with, or if they find a combination of words to override the model’s original script or prompts, the user can cause the model to perform unintended actions.


Such inputs could cause a chatbot to generate offensive content or reveal confidential information in a system that accepts unchecked input.


According to the NCSC, prompt injection attacks can also cause real world consequences, if systems are not designed with security. The vulnerability of chatbots and the ease with which prompts can be manipulated could cause attacks, scams and data theft. The large language models are increasingly used to pass data to third-party applications and services, meaning the risks from malicious prompt injection will grow.


The NCSC said: “Prompt injection and data poisoning attacks can be extremely difficult to detect and mitigate. However, no model exists in isolation, so what we can do is design the whole system with security in mind.”


The NCSC said that cyber-attacks caused by artificial intelligence and machine learning that leaves systems vulnerable can be mitigated through designing for security and understanding the attack techniques that exploit “inherent vulnerabilities” in machine learning algorithm.


Adapted from: The Guardian, Wednesday 30 August 2023, page 4.

Based on the text, mark the statements below as true (T) or false (F).

( ) Chatbots have been trained to emulate human communication.
( ) Problems in cybersecurity have ceased to exist.
( ) Control over confidential data is still at risk.

The statements are, respectively:
An English teacher asks their group of 16-year-old students to read the internet post “Top 10 Educational Blogs for Teens” and decide on one of the blogs to follow during the semester. After going through the material, the group chooses blog #6 Science News for Students, which is introduced as follows:

#6 Science News for Students

Created by the Society for Science, this blog is dedicated to promoting a love for science in teenagers by presenting complex topics in a clear and understandable manner. It covers a wide range of scientific subjects, from biology and chemistry to astronomy and environmental science.
What is so special about Science News for Students is its well-written, easy-to-understand content that not only informs but also inspires. It gives young learners the opportunity to stay updated on the latest scientific advancements, encouraging their curiosity and critical thinking.

https://www.nshss.org/resources/blog/blog-posts/top-10-educationalblogs-for-teens. Acesso em 22.04.2025. Adaptado.

The purpose of the teacher to have the students read the whole post and then choose one particular blog to follow is that they develop a more fluent reading in English. The instruction provided – “Quickly go through the blogs in the post to have a general idea of their content and then decide which one you would like to follow” – focuses on the development of the reading ability named.
Text I


Shock of the old: Believe it or not, battery-powered vehicles
have been around since Victorian times.

The history of the electric car is surprisingly enraging. If you imagine early electric vehicles at all (full disclosure: I didn’t until recently), it will probably be as the quixotic and possibly dangerous dream of a few eccentrics, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, when domestic electrification became widespread. It’s easy to imagine some stiff-collared proto-Musk getting bored of hunting and affairs, eyeing his newly installed electric lights speculatively, then wreaking untold havoc and mass electrocutions. The reality is entirely different.

By 1900, a third of all cars on the road in the US were electric; we’re looking at the history of a cruelly missed opportunity, and it started astonishingly early. The Scottish engineer Robert Anderson had a go at an electric car of sorts way back in the 1830s, though his invention was somewhat stymied by the fact rechargeable batteries were not invented until 1859, making his crude carriage something of a one-trick pony (and far less useful than an actual pony).

It’s debatable whether or not Scotland was ready for this brave new world anyway: in 1842, Robert Davidson (another Scot, who had, a few years earlier, also tried his hand at an electric vehicle) saw his electric locomotive Galvani “broken by some malicious hands almost beyond repair” in Perth. The contemporary consensus was that it was attacked by railway workers fearful for their jobs.

Despite this unpromising start, electric vehicles had entered widespread commercial circulation by the start of the 20th century, particularly in the US. Electric cabs crisscrossed Manhattan, 1897’s bestselling US car was electric and, when he was shot in 1901, President McKinley was taken to hospital in an electric ambulance. London had Walter Bersey’s electric taxis, and Berlin’s fire engines went electric in 1908; the future looked bright, clean and silent.

By the 1930s, however, the tide had definitively turned against electric, cursed by range limitations and impractical charging times while petrol gained the upper hand thanks partly – and ironically – to the electric starter motor. The Horseless Age magazine, which vehemently backed the petrol non-horse, would have been delighted. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the late 1960s, when the US Congress passed a bill promoting electrical vehicle development, but nothing much actually happened until the Nissan Leaf sparked interest in 2009. Electric still isn’t quite there yet, battling infrastructure and battery problems that might have been familiar to Anderson and friends.


Adapted from The Guardian, Tuesday 24 October 2023, p. 6 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/shock-of-the-old/2023/oct/24/all
The last sentence indicates that some hurdles remain to be:
Read Text II and answer the five questions that follow it


Text II

OpenAI’s GPT-4 Scores in the Top 1% of Creative Thinking

By Erik Guzik

Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines. Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.

New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic—as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers’ strike.

And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity—along with examples of both its promise and peril—is likely just beginning.

When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal, or problem by generating something new—a product or solution that didn’t previously exist.

In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources — ideas, materials, knowledge — in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something the creator did not — and perhaps could not — foresee.

Our results?

GPT-4 scored in the top 1 percent of test-takers for the originality of its ideas. From our research, we believe this marks one of the first examples of AI meeting or exceeding the human ability for original thinking.

In short, we believe that AI models like GPT-4 are capable of producing ideas that people see as unexpected, novel, and unique. Other researchers are arriving at similar conclusions in their research of AI and creativity.

Adapted from https://singularityhub.com/2023/09/10/openais-gpt-4-scores-in-thetop-1-of-creative-thinking/
In the last paragraph, the phrase In short is similar in meaning to
Leia o texto a seguir:

A Well Respected Man
The Kinks
'Cause he gets up in the morning
And he goes to work at nine
And he comes back home at five-thirty
Gets the same train every time
'Cause his world is built 'round punctuality
It never fails

And he's oh, so good
And he's oh, so fine
And he's oh, so healthy
In his body and his mind
(…)

And his mother goes to meetings
While his father pulls the maid
And she stirs the tea with councilors
While discussing foreign trade
And she passes looks, as well as bills
At every suave young man (…)
DAVIES, Ray. A well respected man. Disponível em: https://lyrics.lyricfind.com/lyrics/the-kinks-a-well-respected-man. Acesso em: 12 jul. 2024. Adaptado.

Letras de música podem ser ótimos recursos para desenvolver uma habilidade exigida pelo currículo escolar. A letra de “A well respected man” poderia ser mais bem usada para trabalhar qual habilidade dos estudantes?

READ TEXT II AND ANSWER THE FOUR QUESTION THAT FOLLOW IT.


TEXT IV


Assessment for Young Learners in the English Language Classroom



All forms of assessment have an impact on school and classroom culture – it can drive what is taught and how. The process and outcomes of assessment also affect both the teachers’ and the learners’ understanding and experience of learning. Our most common understanding of assessment is that it summarises attainment. This has an especially strong focus in education where summative assessments, the achievement tests that typically occur at the end of an instructional programme, have guided the emphasis in curricula. In true terms, however, assessment is the process of collecting and interpreting evidence to make judgements about a learner’s performance. Thinking about the process in this way allows teachers to gather evidence as an ongoing activity during the learning programme and, as a result, to identify strengths and weaknesses that inform future classroom content. This formative approach, where assessment forms part of the learning cycle, is able to capture more detailed and nuanced data about a learner’s performance than the broader brush stroke of a summative score and consequently supports deeper and more consequential learning. More importantly, there is an influential argument that, in education, we should not even be doing assessment unless it has an impact on learning, and this goes to the heart of the purposes of assessment.


Adapted from: https://www.cambridge.org/us/files/9516/0217/6403/ CambridgePapersInELT_AssessmentForYLs_2020_ONLINE.PDF


The expression “the broader brush stroke” is an idiom that means a(n)
Text II


A river in flux

MANAUS, BRAZIL—Jochen Schöngart darts back and forth along an escarpment just above the Amazon River, a short water taxi ride from downtown Manaus, Brazil. It’s still early this October morning in 2023, but it’s already hot and his face is beaded with sweat. “Look, there’s a piece of ceramic!” he says, nodding to a worn shard lodged between boulders, likely a relic of an earlier civilization. It’s not the only one.


Schöngart, a forest scientist at the National Institute of Amazon Research (INPA), stoops and stares at the bedrock at his feet. Well below the river’s normal level for this time of year, the rock bears a gallery of life-size faces, perhaps carved during a megadrought 1000 years ago. Now, they have been exposed again by a new drought, the worst in the region’s modern history.


In the previous 4 months, only a few millimeters of rain have fallen in this city of 2 million at the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. Normally it gets close to a half a meter during the same period. The Amazon sank steadily beginning in June, as it does most years during the dry season. But by mid-October, the port’s river gauge reached the lowest level observed since the record began in 1902. Freighters coming up from the Atlantic Ocean—the city’s primary supply line—were blocked by shoals. Factories furloughed workers.


Making matters worse, the drought coincided with a series of week-long heat waves. In September and October, withering conditions persisted across the Amazon, and temperatures here peaked at 39°C, 6°C above normal. Desiccated jungle set ablaze by farmers enveloped the city in choking smoke. Then, in the season’s most freakish episode, a sandstorm blotted out the Sun.


Drought and heat are only half of the story of the changes unfolding in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest. Schöngart and collaborators’ research on the river here has shown that for decades, while dry-season low water has been plummeting, rainyseason high water has been rising. The city has experienced frequent major flooding in recent years because of heavy rains across much of the Amazon Basin, forcing the officials to erect temporary wooden walkways above streets of the historic waterfront.

Schöngart and other researchers expect such changes to intensify as global climate warms. The current drought provided a grim preview, killing river dolphins and fish, and threatening livelihoods for communities along the river. If the combination of higher highs and lower lows becomes the new norm, the ramifications could extend throughout the Amazon Basin and even beyond, threatening the very existence of the forest—which harbors much of the planet’s biodiversity, has a far-reaching influence over regional and global climate, and sustains millions of people.


“We are undergoing massive changes in the hydrological cycle” of the Amazon Basin, Schöngart says. The question now, he says, is whether its ecosystems and people can adapt.



Adapted from: https://www.science.org/content/article/amazon-river-may-alteredforever-climate-change
In the opening sentence, the forest scientist is described as moving
Text I


Embarking on the ESG journey


Efforts to mitigate the accelerating effects of climate change and address perceived historical social inequities are two powerful issues driving change globally. These movements have enhanced awareness of how all organizations impact, influence, and interact with society and the environment.
They also have spurred organizations to better recognize and manage ESG risks (i.e., risks associated with how organizations operate in respect to their impact on the world around them). This broad risk category includes areas that are dynamic and often driven by factors that can be difficult to measure objectively, such as inclusion, ethical behavior, corporate culture, and embracing sustainability across the organization.
Still, there is growing urgency for organizations to understand and manage ESG risks, particularly as investors and regulators focus on organizations producing high-quality reporting on sustainability efforts. What’s more, that pressure is being reflected increasingly in executive performance as more organizations tie incentive compensation metrics to ESG goals.
Additional risk areas associated with ESG are varied and can include reliance on third-party data, potential reputational damage from faulty reporting, and the real possibility that an organization’s explicit commitments to meet specific sustainability goals could grow into a material weakness.
As ESG reporting becomes increasingly common, it should be treated with the same care as financial reporting. Organizations need to recognize that ESG reporting must be built on a strategically crafted system of internal controls and accurately reflect how an organization’s ESG efforts relate to each other, the organization’s finances, and value creation. […] Seeking out objective assurance on all ESG-related risk management processes from a qualified, independent, and properly resourced internal audit function should be part of any ESG strategy.


Adapted from: https://www.theiia.org/globalassets/documents/ communications/2021/june/white-paper-internal-audits-role-in-esg-reporting.pdf
When the text informs that the efforts have “spurred organizations” (2nd paragraph), this means that the organizations have been

READ TEXT I AND ANSWER THE QUESTION THAT FOLLOWS IT:

TEXT I

Decolonizing English Language Teaching for Brazilian Indigenous Peoples


In an era of increasing contact between citizens of the diverse nations of the world, the far-reaching impacts of globalization are often linked to the propagation of English as a language for international communication in a variety of settings, including international trade, academic and scientific discourses, and diplomacy, among others. Given its status as an international language, English is also a highly-valued foreign language in Brazil, and its influence represents, at least symbolically, greater access to both national and global markets. As such, federal curricular standards require all students in Brazilian public schools to study English as a foreign language from middle to high school.


These standards also apply to the indigenous populations of Brazil. However, additional federal legislation regulates the ways that English and other subjects must be taught in indigenous communities. The Brazilian Constitution, ratified in 1988, represents a significant landmark in this respect, providing for the inclusion of 'specific, bilingual, differentiated, and intercultural' educational practices within indigenous school settings, thus guaranteeing each indigenous group the right to integrate their traditional knowledge, cultures, and languages into primary and secondary education curricula (Brazil, 1988).


As such, the question of how to teach English in indigenous settings in a way that values traditional cultures and knowledge in accordance with the specific, differentiated, and intercultural approach mandated by federal legislation must be addressed. The status of English as the language of globalization, along with its long history as an instrument of colonial imperialism, poses an ethical dilemma in the Brazilian indigenous educational context, given that its inclusion in indigenous school curricula presents an implicit risk of recreating and reinforcing neocolonial hierarchies of knowledge production that favor Western perspectives over traditional indigenous systems of knowledge.


In an effort to adapt English language teaching to the needs and demands of indigenous communities, contributions from the fields of postcolonial theory, English language teaching, and sociocultural approaches to language teaching will be connected to current Brazilian laws governing indigenous education. The aim is to investigate the possibilities for the teaching of a decolonized, local English that values traditional indigenous knowledge systems over neocolonial global influences which are often associated with English.


Adapted from: https://www.scielo.br/j/edreal/a/43bj8bSQDpQYPjQTX9jK9jb/

The head of the subject of “must be addressed” (3rd paragraph) is

READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER THE QUESTION:



Chatbots could be used to steal data, says cybersecurity agency


The UK’s cybersecurity agency has warned that there is an increasing risk that chatbots could be manipulated by hackers.


The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said that individuals could manipulate the prompts of chatbots, which run on artificial intelligence by creating a language model and give answers to questions by users, through “prompt injection” attacks that would make them behave in an unintended manner.


The point of a chatbot is to mimic human-like conversations, which it has been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data. Commonly used in online banking or online shopping, chatbots are generally designed to handle simple requests.


Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI chatbot Bard, are trained using data that generates human-like responses to user prompts. Since chatbots are used to pass data to third-party applications and services, the NCSC has said that risks from malicious “prompt injection” will grow.


For instance, if a user inputs a statement or question that a language model is not familiar with, or if they find a combination of words to override the model’s original script or prompts, the user can cause the model to perform unintended actions.


Such inputs could cause a chatbot to generate offensive content or reveal confidential information in a system that accepts unchecked input.


According to the NCSC, prompt injection attacks can also cause real world consequences, if systems are not designed with security. The vulnerability of chatbots and the ease with which prompts can be manipulated could cause attacks, scams and data theft. The large language models are increasingly used to pass data to third-party applications and services, meaning the risks from malicious prompt injection will grow.


The NCSC said: “Prompt injection and data poisoning attacks can be extremely difficult to detect and mitigate. However, no model exists in isolation, so what we can do is design the whole system with security in mind.”


The NCSC said that cyber-attacks caused by artificial intelligence and machine learning that leaves systems vulnerable can be mitigated through designing for security and understanding the attack techniques that exploit “inherent vulnerabilities” in machine learning algorithm.


Adapted from: The Guardian, Wednesday 30 August 2023, page 4.

The newspaper headline expresses the agency’s:
Text I


Shock of the old: Believe it or not, battery-powered vehicles
have been around since Victorian times.

The history of the electric car is surprisingly enraging. If you imagine early electric vehicles at all (full disclosure: I didn’t until recently), it will probably be as the quixotic and possibly dangerous dream of a few eccentrics, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, when domestic electrification became widespread. It’s easy to imagine some stiff-collared proto-Musk getting bored of hunting and affairs, eyeing his newly installed electric lights speculatively, then wreaking untold havoc and mass electrocutions. The reality is entirely different.

By 1900, a third of all cars on the road in the US were electric; we’re looking at the history of a cruelly missed opportunity, and it started astonishingly early. The Scottish engineer Robert Anderson had a go at an electric car of sorts way back in the 1830s, though his invention was somewhat stymied by the fact rechargeable batteries were not invented until 1859, making his crude carriage something of a one-trick pony (and far less useful than an actual pony).

It’s debatable whether or not Scotland was ready for this brave new world anyway: in 1842, Robert Davidson (another Scot, who had, a few years earlier, also tried his hand at an electric vehicle) saw his electric locomotive Galvani “broken by some malicious hands almost beyond repair” in Perth. The contemporary consensus was that it was attacked by railway workers fearful for their jobs.

Despite this unpromising start, electric vehicles had entered widespread commercial circulation by the start of the 20th century, particularly in the US. Electric cabs crisscrossed Manhattan, 1897’s bestselling US car was electric and, when he was shot in 1901, President McKinley was taken to hospital in an electric ambulance. London had Walter Bersey’s electric taxis, and Berlin’s fire engines went electric in 1908; the future looked bright, clean and silent.

By the 1930s, however, the tide had definitively turned against electric, cursed by range limitations and impractical charging times while petrol gained the upper hand thanks partly – and ironically – to the electric starter motor. The Horseless Age magazine, which vehemently backed the petrol non-horse, would have been delighted. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the late 1960s, when the US Congress passed a bill promoting electrical vehicle development, but nothing much actually happened until the Nissan Leaf sparked interest in 2009. Electric still isn’t quite there yet, battling infrastructure and battery problems that might have been familiar to Anderson and friends.


Adapted from The Guardian, Tuesday 24 October 2023, p. 6 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/shock-of-the-old/2023/oct/24/all
The author’s account discloses an evolution that can be understood as being:

READ TEXT I AND ANSWER THE QUESTION THAT FOLLOWS IT:

TEXT I

Decolonizing English Language Teaching for Brazilian Indigenous Peoples


In an era of increasing contact between citizens of the diverse nations of the world, the far-reaching impacts of globalization are often linked to the propagation of English as a language for international communication in a variety of settings, including international trade, academic and scientific discourses, and diplomacy, among others. Given its status as an international language, English is also a highly-valued foreign language in Brazil, and its influence represents, at least symbolically, greater access to both national and global markets. As such, federal curricular standards require all students in Brazilian public schools to study English as a foreign language from middle to high school.


These standards also apply to the indigenous populations of Brazil. However, additional federal legislation regulates the ways that English and other subjects must be taught in indigenous communities. The Brazilian Constitution, ratified in 1988, represents a significant landmark in this respect, providing for the inclusion of 'specific, bilingual, differentiated, and intercultural' educational practices within indigenous school settings, thus guaranteeing each indigenous group the right to integrate their traditional knowledge, cultures, and languages into primary and secondary education curricula (Brazil, 1988).


As such, the question of how to teach English in indigenous settings in a way that values traditional cultures and knowledge in accordance with the specific, differentiated, and intercultural approach mandated by federal legislation must be addressed. The status of English as the language of globalization, along with its long history as an instrument of colonial imperialism, poses an ethical dilemma in the Brazilian indigenous educational context, given that its inclusion in indigenous school curricula presents an implicit risk of recreating and reinforcing neocolonial hierarchies of knowledge production that favor Western perspectives over traditional indigenous systems of knowledge.


In an effort to adapt English language teaching to the needs and demands of indigenous communities, contributions from the fields of postcolonial theory, English language teaching, and sociocultural approaches to language teaching will be connected to current Brazilian laws governing indigenous education. The aim is to investigate the possibilities for the teaching of a decolonized, local English that values traditional indigenous knowledge systems over neocolonial global influences which are often associated with English.


Adapted from: https://www.scielo.br/j/edreal/a/43bj8bSQDpQYPjQTX9jK9jb/

“Communication” is to “communicate” as

Atenção! Leia o texto a seguir para responder à próxima questão.



I write with dismay in response to “Flurry of Drama in Sag Harbor” (Sunday Styles, June 23), about Justin Timberlake’s arrest in the Hamptons on a charge of driving while drunk.


The article, while including the particulars of Mr. Timberlake’s arrest, moves quickly to a lighthearted foray into the local community’s reaction to news coverage of the incident.


It would all be in good fun, of course, if not for the fact that, according to the Department of Transportation, each day in the U.S. an average of 37 people suffer serious accidents because of drunken driving, with alarming numbers revealed in 2022.


Instead of sharing those sobering figures, we get a local diner’s perspective that the news coverage of the arrest was over the top because Mr. Timberlake had not gotten into an accident.


That badly misses the point and, with it,The Times badly missed an opportunity to turn a spotlight on the deadly seriousness of drunken driving.


Brad Snyder

Menlo Park, Calif.


SNYDER, Brad. Patients Stunned by Their Medical Bills. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/opinion/patients-medicalbills.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap. Acesso em: 11 jul. 2024. Adaptado.

O reconhecimento de diferentes gêneros textuais é essencial no processo de aprendizagem de uma língua. O texto acima pode ser enquadrado no gênero

READ TEXT IV AND ANSWER THE QUESTION THAT FOLLOWS IT:

TEXT IV



What is the global situation in relation to literacy?



Great progress has been made in literacy with most recent data (UNESCO Institute for Statistics) showing that more than 86 per cent of the world’s population know how to read and write compared to 68 per cent in 1979. Despite this, worldwide at least 754 million adults still cannot read and write, two thirds of them women, and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the worst disruption to education in a century, 617 million children and teenagers had not reached minimum reading levels.


Acquiring literacy is not a one-off act. Beyond its conventional concept as a set of reading, writing and counting skills, literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world.


Literacy is a continuum of learning and proficiency in reading, writing and using numbers throughout life and is part of a larger set of skills, which include digital skills, media literacy, education for sustainable development and global citizenship as well as jobspecific skills. Literacy skills themselves are expanding and evolving as people engage more and more with information and learning through digital technology.

Literacy is a continuum of learning and proficiency in reading, writing and using numbers throughout life and is part of a larger set of skills, which include digital skills, media literacy, education for sustainable development and global citizenship as well as jobspecific skills. Literacy skills themselves are expanding and evolving as people engage more and more with information and learning through digital technology.

Adapted from https://www.unesco.org/en/literacy/need-know

Analyse the assertions below based on Text IV:

I. From a global perspective, illiteracy is still widespread.
II. Compared to 1979, the rate of literacy today has risen.
III. Literacy skills are limited to learning how to read.

Choose the correct answer:
Página 1