Simulados 1 Inglês – SED

(Fuvest SP/2023)

The expression “dark doldrums” chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless.
The dark doldrums make it difficult for us to rely totally on renewable energy. Power companies need to plan not just for individual storms or windless nights but for difficulties that can stretch for days. Last year, Europe experienced a weekslong “wind drought,” and in 2006 Hawaii endured six weeks of consecutive rainy days. On a smaller scale, communities that want to go all-renewable need to fill the gaps. The obvious solution is batteries, which power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles; they are relatively inexpensive to make and getting cheaper. But typical models exhaust their stored energy after only three or four hours of maximum output, and—as every smartphone owner knows—their capacity dwindles with each recharge. Moreover, it is expensive to collect enough batteries to cover longer discharges.
We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a technology called pumped-storage hydropower, used to smooth out sharp increases in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down. Some countries are expanding their use of pumped hydro, but the right geography is hard to find, permits are difficult to obtain, and construction is slow and expensive. The hunt is on for new approaches to energy storage.
The New Yorker. Abril, 2022. Adaptado.

No texto, a expressão “dark doldrums” descreve

(Santa Casa SP/2022)

There is no agent of ecological imperialism more ferocious than the wild pig. Wherever Europeans invaded, from the Americas to Australia, so did their pigs, many of which escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc. The beasts tear through native plants and animals, they spread disease, they destroy crops, and they reconstruct whole ecosystems in their wake. They’re not so much pests as they are chaos embodied.
Now add climate change to the wild pig’s résumé of destruction. In their never-ending search for food, the pigs root through soils, churning the dirt like a farmer tills fields. Scientists already knew, to some extent, that this releases the carbon that’s locked in the soil, but researchers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US have now calculated how much soil wild pigs may be disturbing worldwide. The carbon dioxide emissions that they produce annually, the authors concluded, equal that of more than a million cars.
It’s yet another piece of an increasingly worrisome puzzle, showing how modification of the land has — in this case, inadvertently — exacerbated climate change. “Anytime you disturb soil, you’re causing emissions,” says University of Queensland ecologist Christopher O’Bryan, lead author on a new paper describing the research in the journal Global Change Biology. “When you till soil for agriculture, for example, or you have widespread land-use change — urbanization, forest loss.”
Given their domination of whole landscapes, pigs had to be making things worse, the researchers knew, but no one had modeled it worldwide. “We started to realize there’s a big gap at the global scale looking at this question,” O’Bryan adds.
(Matt Simon. http://www.wired.com, 19.07.2021. Adaptado.)

In the excerpt from the first paragraph “many of which escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc”, the underlined expression can be replaced, without meaning change, by

(ITA SP/2022)

In a new survey of North American Indian languages, Marianne Mithun gives an admirably clear statement of what is lost as each language ceases to be used. “Speakers of these languages and their descendants are acutely aware of what it can mean to lose a language,” she begins – and this is perfectly true, although these speakers must have taken the decision themselves not to teach the language to their children. It happens all too often – people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.
When a language disappears [Mithun continues] the most intimate aspects of culture can disappear as well: fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts, of relating ideas to each other, of interacting to people. The more conscious genres of verbal art are usually lost as well: traditional ritual, oratory, myth, legends, and even humor. Speakers commonly remark that when they speak a different language, they say different things and even think different thoughts. These are very interesting assertions. They slip by in a book on anthropological linguistics, where in a book on linguistic theory they would be highly contentious. Is it true that “fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts [and] of relating ideas to each other” are specific to individual languages and are therefore likely to be lost when a language ceases to be used? Is it true that when speakers speak a different language, they “say different things and even think different thoughts”? Again, the extent to which thought depends on language is very controversial. These questions must be now faced, because only when we have reached an opinion on them will we be able to accept or reject Marianne Mithun’s conclusion: “The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage. It also represents an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience.”
Fonte: Dalby, Andrew. Language in danger. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 252; 285. Adaptado.

De acordo com a linguista Marianne Mithun

(ITA SP/2022)

Jaap Wagelaar was my all-time favorite secondary school teacher. He gave me a 10/10 for my oral Dutch literature exam, taught psychoanalysis during grammar class, astounded pupils with odd puppet show performances during lunch breaks and sadly ended his career with a burn-out. Few students and fellow teachers understood him. But since I trusted his judgment like nobody else’s, I once asked him why Piet Paaltjens and Gerard Reve, both canonized Dutch literary figures, albeit of very divergent genres, could occasionally be kind or ironic but were more often rather cynical, cold and heartless. The response he gave has stuck with me ever since: cynical people are in fact the most emotional ones. Because of their sentimentality they are unable to handle injustice and feel forced to build up a self-protective screen against painful emotions called cynicism. Irony is mild, harmless and green. Sarcasm is biting and represents an orange traffic light. And the color of cynicism is deep red, with the shape of a grim scar that hides a hurt soul. They are all equally beautiful.
These words again came to my mind when thinking back on the dozens of ironic, sarcastic and cynical memes about underperforming politicians and policy scandals disseminated over the past year. Who has not seen the image of Donald Trump walking through a desolate, scorched forest mumbling to himself: ‘My work here is almost done’? Who has not read the scathing reports of Flemish Ministers Bart Somers and Hilde Crevits escaping from a window aided by an unidentified third person after a meeting of the Council of Ministers to avoid critical journalists with the defense that they urgently needed to go on holiday and windows are faster than doors? Who has not come across the video announcement for a fictitious thriller called Angstra Zeneca with Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge exclaiming ‘ik heb er zo’n kankerbende van gemaakt’ (I have made it all a cancerous mess) with a grimace stretching from ear to ear? And who has missed the most recent true story tragicomedy played by Charles Michel, male President of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, female President of the European Commission, who had jointly been invited by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the position of women in Turkey? Unfortunately, they were only offered one chair for two people, which was symbolically occupied by Michel who left Von der Leyen standing awkwardly for a while. She ended up settling for a place on the comfortable sofa reserved for second rank guests. It was damned easy to get addicted to these countless videos, photos, images and written parodies. Oh, did we have fun with them! Some were ironic, some sarcastic and others cynical, but they jointly sketch a disconcerting image of the quality and reputation of key politicians in liberal Western democracies.
Fonte: https://www.eur.nl/en/news/. Publicado em 16/04/2021. Acesso em 29/08/21. Adaptado.

Em um encontro para discutir a posição da mulher, o anfitrião

(ITA SP/2022)

Stupidity permeates our perception and practice of politics. We frequently accuse politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, voters, “elites,” and “the masses” for their stupidities. In fact, it is not only “populist politicians,” “sensational journalism,” and “uneducated voters” who are accused of stupidity. Similar accusations can be, and in fact have been, made concerning those who criticize them as well. It seems that stupidity is ubiquitous, unable to be contained within or attributed to one specific political position, personal trait, or even ignorance and erroneous reasoning.
Undertaking a theoretical investigation of stupidity, Nabutaka Otobe challenges the assumption that stupidity can be avoided. The author argues that the very ubiquity of stupidity implies its unavoidability — that we cannot contain it in such domains as error, ignorance, or “post-truth.” What we witness is rather that one’s reasoning can be sound, evidence-based, and stupid. In revealing this unavoidability, he contends that stupidity is an ineluctable problem not only of politics, but also of thinking. We become stupid because we think: it is impossible to distinguish a priori stupid thought from upright, righteous thought. Moreover, the failure to address the unavoidability of stupidity leads political theory to the failure to acknowledge the productive moments that experiences of stupidity harbor within. Such productive moments constitute the potential of stupidity — that radical new ideas can emerge out of our seemingly banal and stupid thinking in our daily political activity.
Fonte: https://www.routledge.com/. Publicado em 12/10/2020. Acesso em 20/08/2021.

De acordo com o texto, não é correto afirmar que