Questões de Inglês

BILBIES AND FERAL CATS

[1]    More than 20 species of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers
[colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands
that were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with
the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentiveness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction
programs, in order to try to make them more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
[2]    Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists
from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is no longer found. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of
the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using models of cats and the sorts of sounds cats make,
has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures might serve as a form of trainingcamp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-infested homes.
[3]    She tested this idea on bilbies, a small Australian mammal that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred
bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.
She left the animals to get on with their lives for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a
substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably some learning she selected 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to
them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
[4]    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but
only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more
likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
[5]    How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at least provided reason for
hope.

Adapted from The Economist, May 18th 2019. 

BILBIES AND FERAL CATS

[1]    More than 20 species of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers
[colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands
that were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with
the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentiveness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction
programs, in order to try to make them more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
[2]    Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists
from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is no longer found. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of
the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using models of cats and the sorts of sounds cats make,
has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures might serve as a form of trainingcamp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-infested homes.
[3]    She tested this idea on bilbies, a small Australian mammal that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred
bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.
She left the animals to get on with their lives for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a
substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably some learning she selected 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to
them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
[4]    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but
only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more
likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
[5]    How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at least provided reason for
hope.

Adapted from The Economist, May 18th 2019. 

Instrução: A questão estão relacionadas ao texto abaixo.

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new
clothes,” says EM Forster in A Room With a
View, adapting a quote ........ Henry David
Thoreau. What a spoilsport. With the
[05] acquisition of new and unusual kit comes the
chance to become someone fresher, sexier or,
at the very least, someone who is prepared to
give yellow a go.
The reason we are so desperate to buy or
[10] borrow new clothes, says the academic and
broadcaster Shahidha Bari in her clever, subtle
book, is because they appear to bestow ........
us a charm and intellect that we can’t quite
muster for ourselves. Yet the moment we
[15] acquire that new coat or those new trousers,
we realise that nothing much has changed at
all. For no matter how fancy we look on the
surface, ........we still come with metaphorical
trailing threads and odd socks.
[20] Bari wants us to think not so much about what
clothes say as how they make us feel. Take the
suit. The one that she has in mind is worn by
Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959).
Designed by Grant’s Savile Row tailor, Kilgour,
[25] French and Stanley, this suit combines a
ventless jacket with high-waisted, forward
pleated trousers. It is a suit (or suits – during
the five month shoot Grant got through eight
replicas, since hanging from Mount Rushmore by
[30] your fingertips involves a certain wear and tear)
that is simultaneously authoritative and
insouciant.
_____ the appeal of the suit is that it doesn’t
look as if it’s trying too hard, Bari is convinced
[35] that beneath that sheeny worsted surface, it is
doing important work. She is good at dresses
too. By rights, of course, they have no business
being in any modern woman’s wardrobe.
Nearly a hundred years after it became
[40] acceptable for “advanced” females to wear
“divided skirts” ........ the tennis court, why
would anyone voluntarily shimmy themselves
into a garment designed to cling to one’s body
while simultaneously restricting its movement?
[45] Bari is particularly good on how a dress looks
while on a hanger – like a second skin waiting
for flesh and blood to make it live. It is this
sense of the dress as an alternative self that
makes it so potent, far more charged, say, than
[50] well-cut trousers or Merino jumpers: “This
dress – not a poem, not a painting but a dress

– is something, maybe even all things, that we
are not.” Which is why it is the item most likely
to be languishing, unworn, at the back of the
[55] wardrobe, waiting for the moment when we
feel good enough – thin enough, feminine
enough, just enough enough – to put it on.

Adaptado de https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks daily/2019/06/dressed-by-shahidha-bari-andthe-pocket-two-books-on-thesecret-life-ofclothes.html. Acesso em: 19 jul. 2019.

Instrução: A questão está relacionadas ao texto abaixo.

The earliest experience of art must have been
that it was incantatory, magical; art was an
instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art,
that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that
[05] art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this
point that the peculiar question of the value of
art arose. ........ the mimetic theory, by its very
terms, challenges art to justify itself.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have
[10] done so in order to rule that the value of art is
dubious. ........ he considered ordinary material
things as themselves mimetic objects,
imitations of transcendent forms or structures,
even the best painting of a bed would be only
[15] an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art was
not particularly useful (the painting of a bed is
no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense,
true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of
art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all
[20] art is ........ a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s
idea that art is useless. Lie or not, art has a
certain value according to Aristotle because it
is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all,
Aristotle counters, medicinally useful ........ it
[25] arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art
goes hand in hand with the assumption that art
is always figurative. But advocates of the
mimetic theory need not close their eyes to
[30] decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art
is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or
scrapped without ever moving outside the
problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and
[35] reflection upon art have remained within the
confines staked out by the Greek theory of art
as mimesis or representation. It is through this
theory that art as such becomes problematic,
in need of defense. And it is the defense of art
[40] which gives birth to the odd vision by which
something we have learned to call “form” is
separated off from something we have learned
to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned
move which makes content essential and form
[45] accessory.
Even in modern times, when most artists and
critics have discarded the theory of art as
representation of an outer reality in favor of the
theory of art as subjective expression, the main
[50] feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether
we conceive of the work of art on the model of

a picture or on the model of a statement,
content still comes first. The content may have
changed. It may now be less figurative, less
[55] lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a
work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put
today, that a work of art by definition says
something.

Adapted from: SONTAG, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin Modern Classics, Straus and Giroux, 2009. p. 3-4.

Instrução: A questão está relacionadas ao texto abaixo.

The earliest experience of art must have been
that it was incantatory, magical; art was an
instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art,
that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that
[05] art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this
point that the peculiar question of the value of
art arose. ........ the mimetic theory, by its very
terms, challenges art to justify itself.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have
[10] done so in order to rule that the value of art is
dubious. ........ he considered ordinary material
things as themselves mimetic objects,
imitations of transcendent forms or structures,
even the best painting of a bed would be only
[15] an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art was
not particularly useful (the painting of a bed is
no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense,
true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of
art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all
[20] art is ........ a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s
idea that art is useless. Lie or not, art has a
certain value according to Aristotle because it
is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all,
Aristotle counters, medicinally useful ........ it
[25] arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art
goes hand in hand with the assumption that art
is always figurative. But advocates of the
mimetic theory need not close their eyes to
[30] decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art
is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or
scrapped without ever moving outside the
problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and
[35] reflection upon art have remained within the
confines staked out by the Greek theory of art
as mimesis or representation. It is through this
theory that art as such becomes problematic,
in need of defense. And it is the defense of art
[40] which gives birth to the odd vision by which
something we have learned to call “form” is
separated off from something we have learned
to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned
move which makes content essential and form
[45] accessory.
Even in modern times, when most artists and
critics have discarded the theory of art as
representation of an outer reality in favor of the
theory of art as subjective expression, the main
[50] feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether
we conceive of the work of art on the model of

a picture or on the model of a statement,
content still comes first. The content may have
changed. It may now be less figurative, less
[55] lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a
work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put
today, that a work of art by definition says
something.

Adapted from: SONTAG, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin Modern Classics, Straus and Giroux, 2009. p. 3-4.

Instrução: A questão está relacionadas ao texto abaixo.

The earliest experience of art must have been
that it was incantatory, magical; art was an
instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art,
that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that
[05] art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this
point that the peculiar question of the value of
art arose. ........ the mimetic theory, by its very
terms, challenges art to justify itself.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have
[10] done so in order to rule that the value of art is
dubious. ........ he considered ordinary material
things as themselves mimetic objects,
imitations of transcendent forms or structures,
even the best painting of a bed would be only
[15] an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art was
not particularly useful (the painting of a bed is
no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense,
true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of
art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all
[20] art is ........ a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s
idea that art is useless. Lie or not, art has a
certain value according to Aristotle because it
is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all,
Aristotle counters, medicinally useful ........ it
[25] arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art
goes hand in hand with the assumption that art
is always figurative. But advocates of the
mimetic theory need not close their eyes to
[30] decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art
is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or
scrapped without ever moving outside the
problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and
[35] reflection upon art have remained within the
confines staked out by the Greek theory of art
as mimesis or representation. It is through this
theory that art as such becomes problematic,
in need of defense. And it is the defense of art
[40] which gives birth to the odd vision by which
something we have learned to call “form” is
separated off from something we have learned
to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned
move which makes content essential and form
[45] accessory.
Even in modern times, when most artists and
critics have discarded the theory of art as
representation of an outer reality in favor of the
theory of art as subjective expression, the main
[50] feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether
we conceive of the work of art on the model of

a picture or on the model of a statement,
content still comes first. The content may have
changed. It may now be less figurative, less
[55] lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a
work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put
today, that a work of art by definition says
something.

Adapted from: SONTAG, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin Modern Classics, Straus and Giroux, 2009. p. 3-4.