Simple Past

(UNCISAL AL/2018)

Las Vegas shooter’s brain to undergo microscopic study

Scientists are preparing to carry out a microscopic study of the brain of the Stephen Paddock, the gunman who this month killed 58 people and injured nearly 500 in Las Vegas, in the worst mass shooting in modern US history.

Paddock’s brain is being sent to Stanford University for a months-long examination after a visual inspection during an autopsy found no abnormalities, Las Vegas authorities said.

Doctors will perform multiple forensic analyses, including an examination of the 64-year-old’s brain tissue, to find any possible neurological problems. The brain will arrive in California soon, and Stanford has been instructed to spare no expense for the work, the New York Times reported.

[…]

Paddock shot more than a thousand bullets through the windows of a 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel and into a crowd attending an outdoor country music festival. Paddock killed himself with a shot through his mouth, police say.

Investigators remain frustrated by a lack of clues that would point to his motive. Authorities have resorted to putting up billboards in southern Nevada seeking tips and now the intensive brain study. Medical experts say it probably will not yield definitive answers.

[…]

Experts say the brain study on Paddock will be a worthy effort for scientific reasons. Paul S Appelbaum, a psychiatry expert at Columbia University, said that at minimum it might yield something even tangential that could be passed on to the public, such as awareness of psychological disorders or brain diseases.

“Are we ever going to know for certain what caused his brain to do that?” Appelbaum asked. “Probably not from a neuropathological examination, but it’s not unreasonable to ask and see whether it might contribute to our understanding of what occurred.”

Disponível em: <https://www.theguardian.com
/us -news/2017/oct/29/las-vegas-shooter-stephen
paddock-brain -study>. Acesso em: 30 out. 2017.

Assinale a alternativa que apresenta apenas formas verbais no passado.

(UEG GO/2018)    

Who’s driving? Autonomous cars may be entering the most dangerous phase

Autopilot controls are not yet fully capable of functioning without human intervention – but they’re good enough to lull us into a false sense of security.

When California police officers approached a Tesla stopped in the centre of a five-lane highway outside San Francisco last week, they found a man asleep at the wheel. The driver, who was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, told them his car was in “autopilot”, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system.

In a separate incident, firefighters in Culver City reported that a Tesla vehicle parked at the rear of their fire truck as it attended an accident on the freeway. Again, the driver said the vehicle was in autopilot.

The oft-repeated promise of driverless technology is that it will make the roads safer by reducing human error, the primary cause of accidents. However, those vehicles have a long way to go before they can eliminate the drivers.

However, research has shown that drivers get lulled into a false sense of security to the point where their minds and gazes start to wander away from the road. People become distracted or preoccupied with their smartphones. So when the car encounters a situation where the human needs to intervene, the driver can be slow to react.

During tests the IIHS recorded a Mercedes having problems when the lane on the highway forked in two. The radar system locked onto the right-hand exit lane when the driver was trying to go straight.

Concern over this new type of distracted driving is forcing engineers to introduce additional safety features to compensate. For example, GM has introduced eye-tracking technology to check the driver’s eyes are on the road while Tesla drivers can be locked out of autopilot if they ignore warnings to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

In spite of these problems, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, remains bullish about his company’s autonomous technology, even suggesting that by 2019 drivers would be able to sleep in their cars – presumably without being arrested by highway patrol officers.

Disponível em: <https://www.theguardian.
com/technology/2018/jan/24/self-driving-
cars-dangerous-period-false-security>.
Acesso em: 23 fev. 2018. (Adaptado).

Analisando-se aspectos linguísticos e estruturais do texto, constata-se que

(UNIFOR CE/2018)    

Gordon Leroy Holley, ao ser contratado pela Warner Bros, trabalhou como artista de animação/produção em desenhos animados na unidade Friz Freleng em ‘Bugs Bunny’, ‘Road Runner’ e ‘Daffy Duck’.

Na sentença: “I’ve noticed¹ that your ponytail has reached² retirement length, Dave.”, os tempos verbais em negrito significam:

(UNITAU SP/2017)    

Leadless Pacemakers

Pacemakers have come a long way since the 60s, when inventor Dr. Wilson Greatbatch accidentally invented it. The story goes that Greatbatch, working for a doctor at the Chronic Disease Research Institute, was designing a circuit to help record fast heart sounds. By mistake, he grabbed the wrong resistor from a box and plugged it into the circuit he was making. The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for 1 second and then repeated. Greatbatch recognized the lub-dub rhythm.

“I stared at the thing in disbelief,” he said. This was exactly what was needed to drive a sick human heart! For the next five years, most of the world’s pacemakers used that simple blocking oscillator design – just because of Greatbatch’s accident.

Nowadays, companies like Medtronic and St. Jude Medical have created versions called Micra (Medtronic) and Nanostim (St. Jude) that reduce potential risks of transvenous pacemakers such as serious infection.

Adapted from https://getreferralmd.com/2017/01/17-future-
healthcare-technology-advances-of-2017-referralmd/

Tick the alternative that shows the verb tense of the following sentence as found in the text:

“Pacemakers have come a long way since the 60s […]”

(Mackenzie SP/2016) 

According to the lyrics to the song Fire and Rain by James Taylor above,

(FCM PB/2017)    

You mean I don’t have to show up? The promise of telemedicine

“Aside from whatever a visit to the doctor costs you in money, it also costs you in time. A lot of it!

End to end, the travel and waiting time for a doctor’s appointment can take several hours — often disrupting work or school. Only 17 percent of it — 20 minutes, on average — is spent actually seeing the doctor, according to a study by the University of Pittsburgh, physician Kristin Ray and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation.

In a year, Americans spend 2.4 billion hours making doctor visits. Valued at average wage rates, that’s worth more than $52 billion — equivalent to the total working time and income of 1.2 million people. On average, we pay $32 when visiting a doctor. But separately, the value of our time adds up to more, $43, according to Dr. Ray’s study.

For certain kinds of health care, there is a better way. Long after electronic communication and technology have revolutionized other services (like preparing taxes, booking travel and banking), emails, phone calls, video chats and other telemedicine applications are gradually supplementing or replacing some types of office visits.

Telemedicine holds the promise of giving some of our time back. And it may have other advantages. Care delivered in this way requires no travel, and if one waits at all it’s at home or work, not at a doctor’s office. In an era of FaceTime and Skype, patients are starting to expect more convenient access to doctors. The vast majority of patients report that they want to be able to communicate with their doctors by email. Perhaps for this reason, the market for telemedicine is growing rapidly.

In a passionate commentary on the establishment’s hesitancy to embrace telemedicine, David Asch, a University of Pennsylvania physician, pointed out that the inconvenience of face-to-face care limits its use, but arbitrarily and invisibly. The costs of waiting and travel time and those borne by rural populations with poor access to in-person care don’t appear on the books. “The innovation that telemedicine promises is not just doing the same thing remotely,” Dr. Asch wrote, “but awakening us to the many things that we thought required face-to-face contact but actually do not. ”

(Adapted from: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/upshot/you-mean-i-dont-have-
to-show-up-the-promise-of-telemedicine.html?ref=policy)

Analyze each of the following verbs, present in the text above, in order to give its correct tense and classification in either regular or irregular verb.

1. Spent (2nd paragraph)

2. Want (6th paragraph)

3. Pointed (7th paragraph)

4. Wrote (6th paragraph)

(ACAFE SC/2017)    

Brazil has declared an end to its public health emergency over the Zika virus, 18 months after a surge in cases drew headlines around the world.

The mosquito-borne virus was not considered a major health threat until the 2015 outbreak revealed that Zika can lead to severe birth defects. One of those defects, microcephaly, causes babies to be born with skulls much smaller than expected.

Photos of babies with the defect spread panic around the globe as the virus was reported in dozens of countries. Many would-be travellers cancelled their trips to Zika-infected places. The concern spread even more widely when health officials said it could also be transmitted through sexual contact with an infected person.

The health scare came just as Brazil, the epicentre of the outbreak, was preparing to host the 2016 Olympics, fuelling concerns the Games could help spread the virus. One athlete, a Spanish wind surfer, said she got Zika while training in Brazil ahead of the Games. In response to the outbreak, Brazil launched a mosquito- eradication campaign. The health ministry said those efforts have helped to dramatically reduce cases of Zika. Between January and mid-April, 95% fewer cases were recorded than during the same period last year. The incidence of microcephaly has fallen as well.

The World Health Organization (WHO) lifted its own international emergency in November, even while saying the virus remained a threat.

“The end of the emergency doesn’t mean the end of surveillance or assistance” to affected families, said Adeilson Cavalcante, the secretary for health surveillance at Brazil’s health ministry. “The health ministry and other organisations involved in this area will maintain a policy of fighting Zika, dengue and chikungunya.”

All three diseases are carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

But the WHO has warned that Zika is “here to stay,” even when cases of it fall off, and that fighting the disease will be an ongoing battle.

(Fonte: Associated Press, Friday 12 May 2017 10.18 BST.
Last modified on Friday 12 May 2017 22.00 BST)

The incorrect past form of the verb is:

(PUC GO/2017)

Selminha — Até que enfim!

Arandir — Ah, querida. (Arandir apanha entre as suas mãos as de Selminha.)

Selminha — Por onde você andou?

Arandir — Mãos frias!

Selminha — Febre!

Arandir (febril também) — Demorei, porque. Há uma hora que eu rondo a casa. Passei três vezes pelo portão e não entrei, porque. (com um esgar de medo)

Tinha um cara na esquina.

Selminha — Que cara?

Arandir (encerrado no seu medo, sem ouvi-la) — Olhando pra cá.

Selminha (sôfrega) — Você fala como se estivesse fugindo, meu bem!

(Arandir estaca. Volta-se vivamente.)

Arandir (com uma falsa alegria, uma falsíssima naturalidade) — Fugindo, eu? (riso de angústia) a troco de quê? Eu não fiz nada. Não sou nenhum criminoso. Eu apenas. (sem transição, já em tom de lamento) Telefonei para cá. Sempre ocupado!

Selminha (querendo ser natural) — O telefone, meu bem. Tive de desligar, claro! Ligavam pra cá e diziam horrores! Ouvi palavrões que eu não conhecia!

Arandir — Escuta, Selminha, olha. Se me procurarem. Avisa à Dália e dá ordem à criada. Eu não estou pra ninguém. Pra ninguém.

Selminha (sem ouvi-lo) — Você leu?

Arandir (desesperado e suplicante) — Pelo amor de Deus. Escuta. Esse assunto, não!

Selminha — Uma pergunta só.

Arandir — Não. Selminha, não! Eu não estou em estado, compreende? Eu não estou em estado de.

Selminha (doce, mas irredutível) — Arandir, olha pra mim, olha.

Arandir (com sofrida docilidade) — Fala!

Selminha — O que o jornal diz. É só isso que eu quero saber. Só isso, meu bem. O que o jornal diz é verdade?

Arandir (dando-lhe as costas) — Saí do emprego.

Selminha — Te despediram?

Arandir — Eu me despedi. (andando de um lado para outro, com uma excitação agressiva) Hoje, cheguei no emprego. Logo que cheguei, começaram com piadinhas. (mais exaltado) Piadinhas. (subitamente em pânico, pondo-se à escuta) Parou um automóvel! na porta! Não parou um automóvel na porta? (crispando a mão no braço da mulher) Não está ouvindo?

Selminha — Não é aqui!

Arandir (quase sem voz) — Não é aqui?

Selminha (um pouco contagiada pelo medo) — No vizinho! (com súbito desespero, agarrando o marido) Mas que piadinhas?

Arandir (de costas para a mulher e com a voz nítida e vibrante) — Eles me chamaram de viúvo!

Selminha — De quê?

Arandir (com desesperado cinismo) — Viúvo! Do rapaz que morreu! Entende? Você acha que depois disso?

Selminha (atônita) — E você?

Arandir — Eu?

Selminha (fora de si) — Você reagiu?

Arandir — Eu não podia! Eu não!

Selminha (furiosa) — Você devia lhe ter quebrado a cara!

Arandir — Até o chefe. Falou comigo, e olhava para mim. Estava espantado. Espantado. Eu tive a impressão. É um bom sujeito. Um homem de bem. Não sei, mas tive a impressão de que tinha nojo de mim, como se eu!

Selminha (segurando-o com energia) — Arandir!

Arandir — Querida!

Selminha — Como tua mulher, eu te peço. Você vai lá amanhã e quebra. Quebra mesmo! A cara do sujeito!

(RODRIGUES, Nelson. O beijo no asfalto.
Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1995. p. 61-64.)

In text, Selminha asks: “Você leu? and Te despediram?”. Read the alternatives below and mark the one which these two questions would be written in English:

(IFPE/2016)    

Migrant crisis: Hamburg uses shipping containers as homes

 Dust blows across the path as women carry what possessions they have in flimsy blue bin bags. One calls out to a little boy on a bicycle but her words are lost in the sound of loud drilling and hammering.

 Workmen are still building this site and these are some of Hamburg’s newest refugee homes, with room for just over 200 people.

All around are converted shipping containers: functional metal boxes painted red and stacked two storeys high. New tenants are already moving in.

A family invites us inside. Yusef is an energetic young man who introduces his wife, a shy pregnant woman in a bright pink headscarf, and his little girl.

“I didn’t like life in Iraq,” he tells me. “Maybe I’m killed, maybe my children are killed, maybe my wife is killed. In the markets there are car bombers, in the hospital there are car bombers.”

The family is waiting to hear whether Germany will give them a home for the long term.

It can take up to five months for an asylum application to be processed, although the government has promised to reduce the average waiting time to three months.

For now, Yusef and his family live in a single room and share a kitchen and bathroom with the other tenants. His oldest child is now in a German school. He hopes to learn German then get a job.

As Yusef makes tentative plans for the future, the authorities in Hamburg are struggling. It’s estimated that about 400 refugees and migrants arrive here every day.

HILL, Jenny. Migrant crisis: Hamburg uses shipping containers as homes. Disponível em: <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34454384&gt;. Acesso em: 08 out. 2015.

The man interviewed said : “I didn´t like life in Iraq” . Which of the following sentences show the same verb tense of the sentence said by Yusef?

(IFMT/2016)    

EVEN GRAPHICS CAN SPEAK WITH A FOREIGN ACCENT

 ¹ Different cultures use color and other visual cues to send completely different messages. ² Language is not just words. We communicate visually as well, but even our visual symbols are not a universal ³ language. And just as the same gesture can have different meanings from culture to culture, the way visual ⁴ information is used in graphics can have different meanings depending on the cultural context.

⁵ Take the color of money, for instance. Charles Apple, an American visual journalist, was working for a ⁶ newspaper in South Africa when one consultant proposed using green for the business section. But the client ⁷ prefered blue. “Not every country has green money,” Apple says. And that’s not all. “In the United States, red ⁸ usually has a connotation of losses or deficits,” he says. But that’s not true in all countries.”

⁹ usually has a connotation of losses or deficits,” he says. But that’s not true in all countries.” ¹⁰ Western culture, red has negative connotations. In China it’s the opposite. You could see Chinese newspapers ¹¹ where stock market charts use green for negative values and red for positive ones.”

¹² Even Americans and Europeans have their differences when it comes to color. Nick Mrozoswski, an American ¹³ designer and former Creative Director of the Portuguese newspaper i, was surprised by the use of red and ¹⁴ green in his adopted country. “For an American audience, the combination is very deeply associated with ¹⁵ Christmas. I don’t know many American designers who would use it for anything other than a holiday card or ¹⁶ wrapping paper. In Portugal, however, red and green are the colors of the country’s flag, so you see the ¹⁷ combination nearly everywhere you go. The only place you don’t see it is on Christmas cards!”

¹⁸ For the Western culture, red has negative connotations. In China it’s the opposite. In Brazil, the use of color is ¹⁹ also different from American tastes, but that’s changing, says Felipe Memoria, Brazilian and a product design ²⁰ and development firm in New York City. “In Brazil, colors are typically brighter and the compositions are busier.

²¹ A lot of what you see feels a bit more visceral and emotional.” At the same time, he says, global commerce has ²² meant that Brazilian design has gradually had increasing influence from the American culture, which is seen as ²³ high-quality and polished.

²⁴ Even shapes are influenced by culture. Antonio Farach, Honduran, and Adonis Durado, from Philippines, both ²⁵ work at the Times of Oman. Farach noticed how subtle details play a role: “In the Western culture, rounded ²⁶ corners are more accepted than in Arabic countries. In typography, Arabs prefer blade-like typefaces instead of ²⁷ beveled ones.” And sometimes the differences are not so subtle, says Durado. “The big difference is orientation. ²⁸ Arabs write and read from right to left. Since we work for both English and Arabic newspapers, we do the flipping ²⁹ of text flow and images in a very careful manner since not all images can just be flipped—such as maps or other ³⁰ images that are direction-oriented”. (…)

³¹ These journalists and designers had to adapt, but they’re also making their contributions to the cultures they’ve ³² adopted. “When I arrived in Oman, you wouldn’t see any infographics in our newspaper or in our competitors,” ³³ says Durado. “So when I set up our graphic section and started producing graphics, others follow suit.“

(Disponível em <http://news.nationalgeographic.com&gt;.
Acesso em: 26.06.2015. Apdaptado).

Qual das afirmativas corresponde à forma de passado simples da frase “I don’t know how many American designers (…)” (Ref. 15).