Estratégias para fazer interpretação de texto em Inglês

(UFU MG/2015)

Uk School Replaces Library Cards For Kids With Fingerprint Scans
By Clay Dillow

We already know that biometrics could provide some useful new tools for identifying approaching threats or tracking people moving through crowds. But what about checking out books from a children’s library? A Manchester UK primary school is testing out just such a scheme, having children as young as four years old scan their fingerprints as ID for checking books in and out of the school’s library. Not surprisingly, parents and privacy groups have a huge problem with children’s biometric data being so cataloged ― not to mention the precedent it sets. To check out a book, students swipe a bar code placed inside the book at a computer station, which then asks for them to press their thumb on a fingerprint scanner. Books are checked back into the library the same way: no library card or identification required. School officials say the fingerprints are converted to and saved as digital electronic codes that are recognized by the computer, so that no actual fingerprint images are kept on file or shared. Critics of the system, however, find the use of such biometric systems with children so young a breach of privacy and a dangerous overreach by authorities, conditioning children to treat their personal biometric information as something trivial. And it’s worth noting this isn’t the first biometric identifying scheme hatched by UK schools; a fingerprint identifier introduced as part of a cashless school cafeteria system has previously drawn the ire of UK parents who don’t like the idea of their kids being fingerprinted without permission.
But the library system is purely voluntary, and parents are allowed to opt their kids in or out. (…)

Disponível em: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06/uk

According to the text

I. Scanning fingerprints at primary schools has avoided theft of books at libraries.
II. Teens had their fingerprints scanned as ID for checking books in and out of the library.
III. This new way of checking books can be characterized as a card free system.
IV. Fingerprints are kept safe by converting and saving them as digital eletronic codes.
V. The biometric system has been criticized because it is the first experience in UK.

Assinale a alternativa que apresenta apenas afirmativas corretas.

(UECE CE/2012)

Language is forever changing – and forms such as tweets and text messages are no less valid than any textbook version, says the linguist David Crystal, whose latest book encourages children to engage with the possibilities of their lingua franca.

Were the English language ever to need an official guardian, Professor David Crystal certainly looks the part. But the professor would, I suspect, quickly shrug off such a custodial title – not out of modesty, but principle. Though many endangered languages need their champions, he would say, English does not require a guardian; it is vibrant and evolving and can fend for itself.

Crystal’s A Little Book of Language is the latest work of a prolific career. He already has more than 100 books to his name; some are academic but many are for the general inquisitive reader, including By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English and Shakespeare’s Words, which was co-authored by his son, Ben.

For the Crystals, linguistics is clearly a family affair. In the jaunty early chapters of A Little Book of Language, Crystal notes how, when his four children were young, he would study them.”We’re talking the 1960s, when the study of linguistics had hardly begun – people did not know, in a scientific way, how you developed language,” he recalls. “Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It’s what linguists do. You don’t talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.”

Something must have rubbed off. Though his elder two children, Steven and Sue, eschewed academia, his daughter Lucy took up copywriting and his son Ben, an actor, is now following his father. “His book Shakespeare on Toast was a runaway hit – I wish I’d written it!” says Crystal, before rapidly, and self-effacingly, adding: “But I couldn’t have – because it was so cool and modern and so street in its approach to Shakespeare. He has examples of hip-hop Shakespearians and I would never have dared put any of that stuff into one of my books.”

A Little Book of Language is a simple history of all language, taking in phonetics, development, social uses, the internet, endangered languages and a touch of literature.

This all sounds very innocent, but books for children can be a contentious issue. Language, as much as history, is part of a national identity and cannot escape contemporary debates. And since Crystal began his academic career in the early 1960s, there have been dramatic shifts in how the English language is taught. “The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior,” he says. “Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn’t want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There’s a new kind of ethos now.”

What has replaced it is something far more fluid – descriptive rather than prescriptive, as the terminology goes. In schools, appropriateness has replaced the principle of correctness. “Now, one looks at all varieties of language and asks why they are used, says Crystal. “We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.”

This doesn’t sit easy with the traditionalists, of whom there are still many. His clearest example is the belief that text messaging is destroying children’s ability to spell. “It’s all nonsense, but people believe it.”

He addressed this in his book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, published three years ago, in which he found that “txt speak” accounted for barely 10 per cent of the contents of the messages exchanged, and noted that abbreviations have always been part of the English language. Having solved that argument with some decent data, he tells me that he’s now moving on to Twitter.

“On Twitter [which limits each written entry to 140 characters], you don’t get the range of texting abbreviations you get in text messaging. It’s a more sophisticated kind of communicative medium. You get semantic threads running through it. When you start counting thousands and thousands of messages, you suddenly realise that on the whole it’s a new art form in the making.”

The breadth of the internet means that language is morphing not just on grocers’ signs and in school playgrounds, but on a far more fundamental level.

“All these different genres – instant messaging, blogging, chatrooms, virtual worlds – have evolved different sets of communicative strategies, which means that you can look at the language and say, ‘That must be an example of a chatroom, that must be an example of a tweet,’ and you can predict it.”

Becoming involved in bigger arguments seems to be an occupational hazard for a linguist. Whether it be education, politics or neuroscience, we all have a vested interest in the implications of language. Our conversation turns to the recent news of a man who had been lying in a vegetative state for seven years before doctors managed to establish basic communication by scanning his brainwaves. “We are moving fast in a direction where you will be able to see what people are saying,” says Crystal, optimistically. “We’ve got to the stage where you can see the complexity of language processing. We’re not at the stage yet of being able to see clearly individual sentence patterns and words, but it’s not long off.”

Surely this has huge implications, not least for personal liberties? “It is the case that virtually every language issue resolves into a social or political or psychological issue,” Crystal reminds me. “Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like. At which point, you know that a linguist has to bow out and say, ‘This is bigger than me.'”

By Joy Lo Dico

14 March 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk

As to the relation between the advances of brainwaves scanning, also called brain imaging, and the understanding of language processing, Crystal thinks that

(UNESP SP/2009)

Ecological Intelligence

Bryan Walsh

When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn´t tell the whole story – like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you possibly consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it?

Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose – and probably couldn´t make sense of the information even if we had it.

But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That´s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision – and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That´s thinking ecologically – understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices.

(Time, March.12, 2009)

Assinale a alternativa que corresponde, em português, à palavra lack na frase – Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose…

(UNIFRA RS/2006)

PLANE SPEAKING

Forget to learn Mondarin before your business trip to China? Just take an in – flight crash course. Serveral airlines offer interactive lessons that run on their personalized entertainment systems. Passengers listen, repeat and administrater self-tests. The couses don’t promise to have beginners fluent in 20 hours, but they do hope to save you at least some desperate gesticulating when you land. “We concentrate on words and phrases that can be used immediately upon arrival. “ says Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson, whose airline startted offering Spanish and English last August (virgin – atlantic.com) has just launched Berlilitz Word traveler, which offers 11 languages, with plans to add nine more languages by  the end of the year. Set up like a game, Word Traveler teaches numbers, dates, simples word and dialogue and gives pronunciation tests. Travelers who finish a couse get a certificate, so you can prove you passed with finish a couse get a certificate, so you can prove you passed with flying colors.

YEPOKA YEEBO NEWSWEEK AUGUST 15,2005

O curso de línguas “Berlitz Word Traveler” oferece aos passageiros

(UFGD MS/2009)

“The cultural wealth of the world

is its diversity in dialogue”

The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was adopted unanimously in a most unusual context. It came in the wake of the events of 11September 2001, at the UNESCO General Conference, which was the meeting for its 31st session, was the first ministerial-level meeting to be held after those terrible events. It was an opportunity for States to reaffirm their conviction that intercultural dialogue is the best guarantee of peace and to reject outright the theory of the inevitable clash of cultures and civilizations. Such a wideranging instrument is a first for the international community. It raises cultural diversity to the level of “the common heritage of humanity”,“as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature” and makes its defence an ethical imperative indissociable from respect for the dignity of the individual. The Declaration aims both to preserve cultural diversity as a living, and thus renewable treasure that must not be perceived as being unchanging heritage but as a process guaranteeing the survival of humanity; and to prevent segregation and fundamentalism which, in the name of cultural differences, would sanctify those differences and so counter the message of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Universal Declaration makes it clear that each individual must acknowledge not only otherness in all its forms but also the plurality of his or her own identity, within societies that are themselves plural. Only in this way can cultural diversity be preserved as an adaptive process and as a capacity for expression, creation and innovation. The debate between those countries which would like to defend cultural goods and services “which, as vectors of identity, values and meaning, must not be treated as mere commodities or consumer goods”, and those which would hope to promote cultural rights has thus been surpassed, with the two approaches brought together by the Declaration, which has highlighted the causal link uniting two complementary attitudes. One cannot exist without the other.The Declaration, accompanied by the main lines of an action plan, can be an outstanding tool for development, capable of humanizing globalization. Of course, it lays down not instructions but general guidelines to be turned into groundbreaking policies by Member States in their specific contexts, in partnership with the private sector and civil society. This Declaration, which sets against inward-looking fundamentalism, is the prospect of a more open, creative and democratic world, and also, now, one of the founding texts of the new ethics promoted by UNESCO in the early twenty-first century. My hope is that one day it may acquire the same force as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Koïchiro Matsuura

Director-General

Disponível em:

<http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf&gt;.

Acesso em: 09/12/2008.

Pela leitura do texto, a UNESCO entende que

(UFBA/2008)

WANTED: FOREIGNERS

Universities are competing to attract the best, brightest and richest¹² students.

Students who want to obtain their degrees abroad⁴ have never had more options.

For decades, the best⁵, brightest and richest typically chose⁶ between Oxford/Cambridge and America’s top universities. No longer. Recognizing the amount of money that foreign students bring, countries including New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands and Japan have begun increasing efforts to attract them.

With visa¹ restrictions and high fees² creating obstacles for foreign students in America and Britain, other countries are reaching out. The Netherlands now teaches more than fifty percent of its master’s programs in English, and has increased⁷ recruitment efforts overseas¹¹. In New Zealand, the number of international students jumped from about four thousand in 1999 to more than twenty-one thousand in 2004, with the country earning an estimated $1.2 billion off them.

Even Japan is reaching out to nonnative⁸ students. In 2004, Tokyo’s Waseda University launched³ the School of International Liberal Studies, where a quarter of the students are foreign and all classes are taught⁹ in English – except Japanese studies. Already three times more foreign students have applied than could matriculate. “This is one way for Japan’s higher education to become globally competitive,” says Dean Katsuichi Uchida.

America and Britain are fighting to keep their share of the market. “Continental Europe used to see marketing education as dirty, but schools are starting to say,  ‘We have to be more proactive to compete¹⁰’,” says B. Wachter, director of the Academic Cooperation Association in Brussels. If they don’t go after foreign students, someone else will.

BROWNELL, Ginanne. Wanted foreigners. Newsweek, New York, v. CXLVIII,

2006. 8/9, p. 54, Aug. 21/28, 2006. Adaptado.

“visa” (ref.1) — visto (de passaportes).

“fees” (ref.2) — taxas (de matrícula, exames, etc.).

“launched” (ref.3) v. to launch — criou, inaugurou.

Com base na leitura do texto, é correto afirmar:

(UNIOESTE PR/2008)

Consequences: Reading Skills Are Tied to a Longer, Healthier Life

Health Literacy and Mortality Among Elderly Persons

David W. Baker, MD, MPH; Michael S. Wolf, PhD, MPH; Joseph Feinglass, PhD; Jason A. Thompson, BA; Julie A. Gazmararian, PhD; Jenny Huang, PhD

Archives of International Medicine, 2007

Older people who lack “health literacy” — that is, they cannot read and understand basic medical information — may be paying a high price. A new study finds that they appear to have a higher mortality rate than more-literate patients.

As the authors note, education levels have long appeared to play a role in longevity: one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates.

The explanation, researchers have suggested, may be that better education tends to result in better jobs, housing, food and health care.

But, writing in the July 23 Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers say that one particular characteristic of a poor education, low reading skills, may alone account for much of the problem. The researchers based their findings on a study of 3,260 Medicare patients over more than five years.

At the beginning of the study, the patients were asked about their health and backgrounds and given a health literacy test that required reading and some math.

More than 60 percent of the patients were described as having adequate skills. But about a tenth was described as having marginal skills and a quarter as not literate. They were more likely to be older and  nonwhite, the study said.

In the following years, those with inadequate reading skills were the most likely to die, even when overall education and other social factors were taken into account.

The most common cause of death in the group was cardiovascular disease, with a rate of more than 19 percent. The rate for those described as health-literate was 8 percent.

Stuart Goldenberg, New York Times, July 31, 2007

(text adapted)

Assinale a alternativa correta em relação ao texto:

(UERJ/2013)

The art of difference

¹ Mutuality in recognizing and negotiating difference is crucial for people to deal with their past and ² the future; it is also essential in the process of creating a culture of responsibility. How can this ³ be achieved and what is the role of art in this process?

⁴ A vision based on ideologies solves both challenges of sharing – the interpretation of the past ⁵ and the projections of the future. But ideologies are somehow “total”, if not totalitarian, because ⁶ there is not much space for serious public negotiation. Individuals, then, lose their integrity or are ⁷ restricted to their private spheres and, in the end, their memories become part of the dominant ⁸ identity discourse, their aspirations are delegated. Even in less obvious systems of ideological ⁹ rule, where individual subscription to the official story line seems to be consciously voluntary and ¹⁰ collective memories are willingly encouraged for the sake of collective identities, the negotiation ¹¹ of difference is often not welcome: exclusion happens quickly and non–conformist doubts produce ¹² suspicion.

¹³ A democratic vision – shared aspirations for the future, based on negotiated interpretations of ¹⁴ the past that respect diversity – is necessarily found in complex processes of private and public ¹⁵ discourse and participatory and inclusive culture. Yet, politics tends to reduce complexity and ¹⁶ engineer the balance between the individual and the collective rather than invest in processes of ¹⁷ negotiation. We have learned, though, that this social engineering is a phantasm, largely limited¹⁸ and limiting, and, even if successful, often creates paranoid and fatal structures of homogeneity ¹⁹ by trying to mould memories and hopes.

²⁰ Humankind has gathered impressive knowledge about the limitations of the human will and ²¹ the failures of such “engineering”. Nevertheless, despite this, and maybe even because of it, ²² we cannot give up trying the impossible: to create conditions for equality and solidarity for ²³ individuals to flourish. These conditions should be accompanied by narratives of a just, fair and ²⁴ free commonwealth of all. If history and memory seem to make this dream an unlikely scenario, ²⁵ can art play this part?

²⁶ The role of art is precisely to keep inspiration alive, to deconstruct ideology, to recall the necessary ²⁷ dream of freedom, of the individual and of the common good beyond the “either/or” and beyond ²⁸ simplicity. In this sense, art in general prevents false hopes, and thus generates hope in the most ²⁹ paradoxical way: the only way of hoping that reaches beyond the private sphere without some ³⁰ kind of ideological distortion.

³¹ What makes art so unique? And why? Because the best narratives of art are purpose‑free, ³² uniquely non‑instrumental, simply human. Art narrates what we don’t understand in enlightened ³³ ways. Artists in particular offer a wealth of unseen perspectives and unexpected pathways of ³⁴ human exploration. Art makes us aware that all memories are personal, despite the power of ³⁵ collective narratives. Arts and culture empower people to think freely, to imagine the unimagined, ³⁶ to feel responsible across borders and boundaries. Hopefully, the narratives of the future will be ³⁷ intercultural – and art will be the ally in the art of difference that needs to be further developed. ³⁸ “Art is about difference, art is difference”, as stated by Igor Dobricic*. And it is difference that will ³⁹ be at the origin of the new bonding narratives of confidence.

Gottfried Wagner alliancepublishing.org

*Igor Dobricic – dramaturgo sérvio

A vision based on ideologies solves both challenges of sharing _ the interpretation of the past and the projections of the future. (Refs. 4-5)

The punctuation mark called dash, in the fragment above, signals the introduction of an explanation.

The dash is equivalent to the following connective:

(IME RJ/2011)

Encontram-se em destaque cinco termos ou expressões. Assinale a alternativa correspondente ao termo cujo emprego está INCORRETO.

I am currently studying for a PhD at the British Antarctic Survey working on the structural interpretation of gravity and magnetic going from east Antarctica, including both numerical and mechanical modelling of data.

(FUVEST SP/2001)

MICHAEL D. COE’S Breaking the Maya Code.

Revised paperback edition. First published 1992.

Thames & Hudson, New York, 1999 ($18.95).

The decipherment of the Maya script was, Coe states, “one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the discovery of the genetic code.” He presents the story eloquently and in detail, with many illustrations of the mysterious Maya inscriptions and the people who tried to decipher them. Most of the credit, he says, goes to the late Yuri V. Knorosov of the Russian Institute of Ethnography, but many others participated. They did not always agree, and some of them went up blind alleys¹.

Coe – emeritus professor of anthropology at Yale University – vividly describes the battles, missteps and successes. What is now established, he writes, is that “the Maya writing system is a mix of logograms and syllabic signs; with the latter, they could and often did write words purely phonetically.”

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

APRIL 2000

According to the passage, Michael D. Coe’s book