Selecione os filtros para encontrar suas questões de concursos e clique no botão abaixo para filtrar e resolver.
Nada por aqui
NO MAN'S LAND
Mystery of world's only stretch of unclaimed land with NO laws that farmer tried to seize to make daughter a princess
Hidden deep in the African desert lies one of the strangest pieces of land on Earth — not for its beauty, wealth, or strategic value, but because no country wants it.
Bir Tawil is a 2,060-square-kilometre patch of barren desert between Egypt and Sudan, which remains an unusual geopolitical anomaly after decades of being unclaimed.
Those daring to go there face a tough journey, driving through remote desert roads past relics of gold mines and, at times, crossing paths with armed gangs and bandits.
Bir Tawil has long been a quirky favourite for small, often tongue-in-cheek, self-declared "countries" - usually founded by ordinary people across the globe.
With no laws, the land has even drawn would-be "kings," including a US dad who trekked there to fulfil his young daughter's wish of becoming a princess.
Jeremiah Heaton, a Virginia farmer, planted a flag and declared Bir Tawil the "Kingdom of North Sudan" so that his daughter Emily could have a royal title. While the move had no legal bearing, it sparked global interest and debate over land claims and the nature of sovereignty.
As the dad tells it, Emily had casually asked if she could be a princess, and Heaton, wanting to make her dream come true, started looking for a way to make that happen. While most parents might have gently explained the impracticality of such a request, Heaton took it as a challenge. He began researching unclaimed land where he could theoretically establish a kingdom for Emily, at the time aged six.
In June 2014, Heaton headed to northeastern Africa, reaching Bir Tawil after a challenging journey through the desert. With a homemade blue flag bearing a crown symbol and the name "Heaton," he ceremoniously planted it in the sand, declaring Bir Tawil the "Kingdom of North Sudan" and himself its king. He immediately proclaimed Emily to be a princess, therefore "granting" her the royal title she had wished for.
In 2017, Suyash Dixit, an IT entrepreneur from Indore, India, also claimed Bir Tawil as his own, naming it the "Kingdom of Dixit." After a challenging journey across the desert, he planted a flag, declared himself king, and even "appointed" his father as prime minister. He posted his claim and experience on social media, where it garnered significant attention and sparked a wave of jokes and memes.
There are rumours, though largely unsubstantiated, that Bir Tawil contains hidden gold deposits.
While Egypt and Sudan have both had ancient ties to gold mining, particularly in the Nubian Desert, Bir Tawil itself is rarely studied or mined. These rumours, however, have attracted a few treasure hunters and adventurers over the years, hoping to uncover hidden riches in the desert.
Some have even joked about Bir Tawil as a potential "backup homeland" for populations affected by natural disasters. While obviously impractical, the idea underscores the paradox of unclaimed land in a time when territorial disputes are common.
Despite several stunts and theories, Bir Tawil remains unclaimed due to a unique border dispute between Egypt and Sudan.
The journey to Bir Tawil is lengthy and can take anywhere from two days to a week, depending on the starting point, route, and conditions. Due to its isolation and extreme desert environment, the journey requires careful planning, local knowledge, and permission from authorities in Egypt or Sudan.
Most travellers begin in Aswan, Egypt, or Khartoum, Sudan, as these are the nearest large cities with transportation infrastructure. From Aswan, the trip typically involves a long desert drive heading southward toward the Egypt-Sudan border.
Both countries monitor the border area closely, with visitors needing permits and a good guide familiar with the region. Egypt, in particular, restricts movement near the border, especially in sensitive zones close to the Hala'ib Triangle.
The trip to Bir Tawil from either Egypt or Sudan covers hundreds of kilometres across remote, rugged desert terrain. Explorers often follow dirt tracks used by nomadic tribes, miners, or military patrols, though few roads are mapped or maintained. The drive can take days and usually involves off-road vehicles capable of handling deep sand and rough trails.
There are no towns, water sources, or services along the way, so travellers must bring ample water, food, fuel, and spare parts. And to make matters worse, armed gangs, smugglers, and bandits often prey upon those venturing in the desert, particularly along less-monitored routes.
The origins of this unclaimed desert stretch back to Britishcolonial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when overlapping boundary lines inadvertently left Bir Tawil in a legal limbo.
In 1899, while both Egypt and Sudan were under British administration, a formal border was established along the 22nd parallel north. This placed Bir Tawil, an arid and resource-poor patch of desert, in Egyptian territory, while a more valuable area, the Hala'ib Triangle, was assigned to Sudan.
But in 1902, the British changed the boundary to fit the local tribes' movements, putting Bir Tawil in Sudan instead and giving Egypt control over the fertile Hala'ib Triangle.
When Egypt and Sudan became independent, each country wanted the Hala'ib Triangle because it has good land and access to the Red Sea.
Egypt claims it based on the 1899 line, while Sudan uses the 1902 line to support its claim. Bir Tawil, a barren desert with no resources, has no value to either country.
To claim the Hala'ib Triangle, each country must reject Bir Tawil — because they can't claim both under their chosen boundary line. So by claiming Hala'ib, they essentially "give away" Bir Tawil, leaving it unwanted.
The territory is therefore unclaimed because Egypt and Sudan only want the valuable land next to it, not Bir Tawil itself.
For now, Bir Tawil endures as a strange relic of colonial history and an unlikely symbol of modern-day geopolitics — a land still ungoverned and, in all likelihood, destined to remain unclaimed.
Source:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30658172/bir-tawil-land-that-bel ongs-to-no-nation/ (adapted)
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30658172/bir-tawil-land-that-belongs-to-no-nation/
Examine the following sentences and mark the alternative that respectively indicates their verb tenses:
"I am finishing my work soon."
"She is going to study for hours."
Text 1
Structure of education in Singapore
The complete control and management of Singapore’s education is in the hands of the Ministry of Education (MOE). With continuous endeavour from MOE, today Singapore can be considered to have a strong and well-reputed education system. As per recent study Singapore is ranked fourth in terms of World’s Best Education System.
The preschools are run by the private sector, including religious bodies, community foundations, business groups, etc. However, every preschool need to register itself with the Singapore Ministry of Education before being functional.
After completion of 6 years of primary education, students have to appear for a Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE). All those students who passed the exam are admitted in a secondary level course, which is usually completed in 4-5 years. It is similar to attending seventh grade through tenth grade in the American education system.
After completion of the secondary education, the students need to appear in Singaporean GCE ‘O’ Level exam. Based on the merit in that exam, students proceed to pre-university education, which is similar to attending eleventh grade and twelfth grade as per the American education system. At this level students can opt for a wide range of subjects from varied academic areas covering Humanities, Arts and Languages, Sciences and Mathematics streams.
www.singaporeeducation.info/Education-System/ Structure-of-Education
Read the following sentence from text 1:
However, every preschool need to register itself with the Singapore Ministry of Education before being functional.
Analyze the underlined words.
1. However is an adverb that can be used at the beginning of a sentence, to introduce a contrasting statement.
2. itself is a relative pronoun that can be used to refer back to register.
3. being is a verb in the progressive tense that means life.
Choose the alternative which contains the correct affirmatives.
Judge the following item, concerning the production of written texts as a process.
The writing process is a one-time event that only occurs once
the writer has a clear idea of what they want to say.
Read the following text to answer the question.
Written by Virginia Woolf, the following letter expresses her fear of another mental breakdown and her decision to take her own life.
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
Text 2
(Part II) Students’ skills
But graduation rates, while important, speak little to the quality of education received. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reviews the extent to which students near the end of their compulsory education (usually around age 15) have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies, particularly in reading, mathematics and science.
In 2018, PISA tested students from 79 countries, including OECD countries, Brazil, the Russian Federation and South Africa. The students were tested on their reading ability, their skills in maths and level in sciences. Research shows that these skills are more reliable predictors of economic and social well-being than the number of years spent in school or in post -formal education. The average student in the OECD area scored 488. On average in the OECD, girls scored 491 compared with 485 for boys.
Estonia is the highest-performing OECD country, with average PISA scores of 526, followed by Japan and Korea with 520 points. The lowest performing OECD country, Colombia, has an average score of 406. This means that the gap between the highest and lowest performing OECD countries is 120 points.
The best-performing school systems manage to provide highquality education to all students. In Canada, Estonia, Finland and Ireland for example, students tend to perform well regardless of their social background. In Israel and Luxembourg however, the gap between the students with the lowest socio-economic background and the students with the highest socio-economic background reaches more than 120 points, suggesting students’ socio-economic background tends to have an impact on their results. On average across OECD countries, there is a widening 89-point difference in PISA scores between the students with the highest and lowest socio-economic background.
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
Text 4
Help students to learn vocabulary in context
The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters (comprehension or production) with words within the context of surrounding discourse. Data from linguistic corpora can provide real-world actual language that has been printed or spoken. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on dictionary definitions, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear. Students will then associate new words with a meaningful context to which they apply. For example, for a beginning level of students, pictures, realia, and gestures can be used to describe meaning incontext. For a more advanced level of students, encourage them to consult online corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, or the Corpus of Contemporary American English: COCA) to gain knowledge of patterned sequences, particularly collocations or words that go together (Liu & Jiang, 2009).
Encourage students to develop word-learning strategies
Included in the discussion of teaching reading were such strategies as guessing vocabulary in context. A number of clues are available to learners to develop word-attack strategies.
Considering that only a small fraction of the word list can be covered inside the classroom, it is necessary for students to develop effective strategies for learning vocabulary on their own. Word-learning strategies refer to “the planned approaches that a word-learner takes as an agent of his or her own word learning” (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 297). Once they encounter unknown words, they can try to figure out how the words are used by asking questions such as:
• Is the word countable or uncountable?
• Is there a particular preposition that follows it?
• Is it a formal word?
• Does it have positive or negative connotations? (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 298)
An effective way to encourage word-learning is to urge students to use vocabulary notebooks to enter new words, and to review them daily, once they identify their learning goals. Studies show that in order to understand television shows learners need to know about 3,000 word families and have knowledge of proper nouns (Web & Rodgers, 2009). If they wish to read novels and newspapers comfortably, they need to have a vocabulary size of 8,000–9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). The fact that increasing vocabulary size will influence the degree to which they can understand and use language may motivate them to be determined to expand their vocabulary notebooks.
Unfortunately, professional pendulums have a disturbing way of swinging too far one way or the other, and sometimes the only way we can get enough perspective to see these overly long arcs is through hindsight. Hindsight has now taught us that there was some overreaction to the almost exclusive attention that grammar and vocabulary received in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. So-called “natural” approaches in which grammar was considered damaging were equally overreactive. Advocating the “absorption” of grammar and vocabulary with no overt attention whatsoever to language forms went too far. We now seem to have a healthy respect for the place of form-focused instruction — attention to those basic “bits and pieces” of a language — in an interactive curriculum. And now we can pursue the business of finding better and better techniques for getting these bits and pieces into the communicative repertoires of our learners.
BROWN, H. D.; LEE, H.. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Fourth Edition. New York: Longman. 2015.
Based on National Curriculum Parameters Document, analyze the sentences below and decide if they are true ( T ) or false ( F ).
( ) Foreign Languages have become an integral part of the wealth of knowledge that is essential to allow students to draw closer to different cultures.
( ) Factors such as the limited number of hours allotted to the study of foreign languages have accounted for the non-enforcement of classes.
( ) Foreign Language classes at average schools ended up taking on a tedious and repetitive overtone, which often deprives both students and teachers of motivation.
( ) Research and Comprehension and, Social and Cultural Contextualization are some of the Competencies and Skills to be Developed in Modern Foreign Language(s).
Choose the alternative which presents the correct sequence, from top to bottom: