Questões de Inglês

Why Everyone Should Read Harry Potter

September 9, 2014

 

Harry Potter is the best selling book series of all time. But it’s had its reproaches. Various Christian groups claimed the books promoted paganism and witchcraft to children. Washington Post book critic Ron Charles called the fact that adults were also hooked on Potter a "bad case of cultural infantilism.” Charles and others also cited a certain artistic banality in massively commercial story-telling, while others criticized Hogwarts, the wizardry academy attended by Potter, for only rewarding innate talents.

The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand, praised J. K. Rowling for freeing English children’s literature from dreams of riches and class and snobbery and giving us a world of youthful democracy and diversity. A growing body of evidence suggests that reading Rowling’s work, at least as a youth, might be a good thing.

(Adaptado de http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-everyone-shouldread-harry-potter/. Acessado em 02/09/2016.)

A leitura do excerto permite concluir adequadamente que:

Considerando o nome da figura - “The Small Talk Thermometer” -, pode-se depreender que a expressão “small talk” se refere a

The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction

By Haruki Murakami

Most people – most of us who are part of Japanese society – graduate from school, then find work, then, after some time has passed, get married. Even I originally intended to follow that pattern. Yet in reality I married, then started working, then finally managed to graduate. In other words, the order I chose was the exact opposite to what was considered normal.

Since I hated the idea of working for a company, I decided to open my own establishment, a place where people could go to listen to jazz records, have a coffee, eat snacks and drink. It was a simple, rather happy-go-lucky kind of idea: running a business like that would let me relax listening to my favorite music from morning till night.

(Adaptado de H. Murakami, Wind and Pimbal – Two Novels. Tradução do japonês para o inglês de Ted Goossen. London: Penguin Random House, 2015, p.5.)

 

O autor do texto

Survey of geopolitics

 

Geopolitics is a product of its time, and its definitions have evolved accordingly. Rudolphh Kjellén, who coined the term in 1899, described geopolitics as "the theory of the state as a geographical organism or phenomenon in space." For Karl Haushofer, the father of German geopolotik, "Geopolitics is the new national science of the state,(…) a doctrine on the spatial determinism of all political processes, based on the broad foundations of geography, especially of political geography". On the eve of World War II, Derwent Whittlesey, the American political geographer, considered geopolitics "a dogma*... the faith that the state is inherently entitled to its place in the sun". Richard Hartshorne defined it as "geography utilized for particular purposes that lie beyond the pursuit of scientific knowledge".

(Adaptado de Saul Bernard Cohen, Geopolitics of the world system. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. p.11.)

 

Conforme o texto,

Leia os versos iniciais do poema The White Man’s Burden

(O fardo do homem branco).

 

Take up the White Man’s burden

Send forth the best ye breed -

Go send your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild-

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child (...)

(Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse. Disponível em http://kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_burden.htm. Acessado em 17/10/2016.)

 

O poema de Rudyard Kipling foi escrito em Londres, em 1898, após a estadia do autor nos EUA. Considerando-se o contexto do imperialismo do século XIX, o poeta expressa

A year before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro is a city in motion, rehearsing, training, driving, sweeping, protesting, calculating and preparing for arguably the biggest event in its history.

At the Olympic Park in Barra da Tijuca, a small forest of cranes swings back and forth over the velodrome and gymnasium even as the last few hold-outs in a nearby favela resist police attempts to forcibly remove them. On the banks of the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, labourers bolt together seating for rowing spectators as frustrated commuters nearby sit in endless traffic jams and wonder how the roads will cope with the influx of visitors. There is work on the waters of Guanabara Bay, on subway expansion under the luxury condominiums of Leblon, in city halls and police meeting rooms.

It is all geared to providing answers to the two key questions facing any Games: “Will it be ready on time?” and, more importantly, “Will it be worthwhile?” – questions that are becoming even more pressing ahead of the opening ceremony on 5 August next year.

Rio and the organising committee say they are focusing on efficiency, legacy and entertainment rather than scale, grandeur and cost. The budget of 38.2bn reais (£7.9bn) is slightly lower than that of London and well below that of Beijing. But this will still be an epic, city-changing undertaking. Rio expects 15,000 athletes, 45,000 volunteers, 93,000 staff and 380,000 visitors for the two and a half weeks of the Olympics and the following 11 days of the Paralympics.

WATTS, Jonathan. Rio 2016: ‘The Olympics has destroyed my home. Disponível em www. theguardian.com.

No trecho, “On the banks of the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, labourers bolt together seating for rowing spectators as frustrated commuters nearby sit in endless traffic jams…”(§ 2°), o uso de AS apresenta uma relação de