Questões de Concursos

Text 7A3-II

400 million people speak English as their first language; another 1.4 billion as a second tongue. Born 1,600 years ago among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, English became global. A new exhibition at the British Library, named Evolving English, traces for the first time the incredible journey launched by the Frisians, Saxons, Angles and Jutes who sailed to southeast England, and whose descendants created the Vespasian Psalter in the eighth century. From the Vespasian Psalter the journey moves on through England’s early literary heroes, Beowulf, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and on to Jonathan Swift.

The curators of Evolving English have been clever to focus not just on English at school and English at work, but English at play, from spoonerisms to malapropisms, puns and palindromes and the 1,800 words invented by William Shakespeare — among them “green-eyed”, “go-between”, “well-read” and “zany”. Not only was Shakespeare the greatest English writer, he could have been no other kind.

Internet: (<www.economist.com> (adapted).

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

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

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

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

The Two Goats

Two Goats, frisking gayly on the rocky steeps of a mountain valley, chanced to meet, one on each side of a deep chasm through which poured a mighty mountain torrent. The trunk of a fallen tree formed the only means of crossing the chasm, and on this not even two squirrels could have passed each other in safety. The narrow path would have made the bravest tremble. Not so our Goats. Their pride would not permit either to stand aside for the other.

One set her foot on the log. The other did likewise. In the middle they met horn to horn. Neither would give way, and so they both fell, to be swept away by the roaring torrent below.

Library of Congress. The Aesop for children. Library of Congress, 2024. Disponível em: https://read.gov/aesop/013.html. Acesso em: 12 jul. 2024.

A questão tem como base o texto abaixo:

Text Two:

“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built—is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are — as long as you wantto change this miserable condition that exists on this Earth.”

(Malcolm X speaking at Oxford University in 1964)

Text CB1A2

Currently, the Digital Euro has not been launched — though there are signs that a launch may be coming sooner rather than later. By October 2025, the ECB (European Central Bank) has indicated a second phase of the preparation for the Digital Euro. By then, the ECB will have prepared an outreach plan, procurement standards, and technology providers.

The Digital Euro has potential downsides, many of them echoed in the other launches of central bank digital currencies. For example, the central bank will become a technology company focused on procurement with central points of failure. This was a breeding ground for corruption for the bureaucrat fortunate enough to make these technical choices in China.

While the Digital Euro is slated to “coexist” with cash, this also comes when EU (European Union) nations are voting on ending end-to-end encryption (a critical digital privacy tool) and have started to restrict cash with limits being placed on how much you can spend in cash to accelerate its slow demise.

User privacy is said to be the ECB’s “chief concern” as it has been designing the central bank’s digital currency. Certainly, the ECB is aware of public perception that has negative surveillance, control, and privacy implications in mind. The ECB has been at pains to say that the Digital Euro will “coexist” with cash and that unlike the e-CNY (China’s central bank digital coin) it will not be tied to a “social credit” score or place limits on how money is spent.

A big part of the ECB’s drive towards the Digital Euro is to compete and pry Europeans away from Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and “stablecoins”.

Central bank digital currencies are a direct liability of the central bank. Since the central bank has the power to issue currency, this means that the central bank can essentially create “digital euros” if it wishes to. The architecture and data within a central bank digital currency are usually built completely by the central bank supported by private vendors of its choice. In China, the central bank has turned away from a distributed ledger technology to a centralized data store, in which the technical details are pretty scant. Hence, the central bank controls everything, and the system has no external access.

Internet: <www.forbes.com/sites> (adapted).

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While plastic refuse littering beaches and oceans draws high-profile attention, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Assessment of agricultural plastics and their sustainability: a call for action suggests that the land we use to grow our food is contaminated with even larger quantities of plastic pollutants. “Soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics and are known to contain larger quantities of microplastics than oceans”, FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo said in the report’s foreword.

According to data collated by FAO experts, agricultural value chains each year use 12.5 million tonnes of plastic products while another 37.3 million are used in food packaging. Crop production and livestock accounted for 10.2 million tonnes per year collectively, followed by fisheries and aquaculture with 2.1 million, and forestry with 0.2 million tonnes. Asia was estimated to be the largest user of plastics in agricultural production, accounting for almost half of global usage. Moreover, without viable alternatives, plastic demand in agriculture is only set to increase. As the demand for agricultural plastic continues surge, Ms. Semedo underscored the need to better monitor the quantities that “leak into the environment from agriculture”.

Since their widespread introduction in the 1950s, plastics have become ubiquitous. In agriculture, plastic products greatly help productivity, such as in covering soil to reduce weeds; nets to protect and boost plant growth, extend cropping seasons and increase yields; and tree guards, which protect young plants and trees from animals and help provide a growth-enhancing microclimate. However, of the estimated 6.3 billion tonnes of plastics produced before 2015, almost 80 per cent had never been properly disposed of. While the effects of large plastic items on marine fauna have been well documented, the impacts unleashed during their disintegration potentially affect entire ecosystems.

(https://news.un.org, 07.12.2021. Adaptado.)

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

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While plastic refuse littering beaches and oceans draws high-profile attention, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Assessment of agricultural plastics and their sustainability: a call for action suggests that the land we use to grow our food is contaminated with even larger quantities of plastic pollutants. “Soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics and are known to contain larger quantities of microplastics than oceans”, FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo said in the report’s foreword.

According to data collated by FAO experts, agricultural value chains each year use 12.5 million tonnes of plastic products while another 37.3 million are used in food packaging. Crop production and livestock accounted for 10.2 million tonnes per year collectively, followed by fisheries and aquaculture with 2.1 million, and forestry with 0.2 million tonnes. Asia was estimated to be the largest user of plastics in agricultural production, accounting for almost half of global usage. Moreover, without viable alternatives, plastic demand in agriculture is only set to increase. As the demand for agricultural plastic continues surge, Ms. Semedo underscored the need to better monitor the quantities that “leak into the environment from agriculture”.

Since their widespread introduction in the 1950s, plastics have become ubiquitous. In agriculture, plastic products greatly help productivity, such as in covering soil to reduce weeds; nets to protect and boost plant growth, extend cropping seasons and increase yields; and tree guards, which protect young plants and trees from animals and help provide a growth-enhancing microclimate. However, of the estimated 6.3 billion tonnes of plastics produced before 2015, almost 80 per cent had never been properly disposed of. While the effects of large plastic items on marine fauna have been well documented, the impacts unleashed during their disintegration potentially affect entire ecosystems.

(https://news.un.org, 07.12.2021. Adaptado.)