Questões de Inglês

Read the text and check the CORRECT meaning of the highlighted false cognates.

FALSE COGNATES ARE A BITCH¹ ! Now the doubt² appears in your mind. How could this have possibly happened? After years of dedication, and maybe even a certificate or two that prove your fluency, you thought you’d eventually³ speak perfectly, but now you just look like an uneducated⁴ fool. You’ve assumed⁵ that you’re fluent, you’ve even discussed⁶ it with your parents⁷ , and now you start to think that maybe you were always just pretending⁸ to speak the language, that you actually⁹ don’t know anything. Be brave¹⁰ and pay attention because maybe you aren’t seeing the true meaning of the words.

Disponível em: http://reallifeglobal.com/the-17-most-dangerous-brazilian-false-cognate-errors-in-english/. Acesso em: Julho 2015.

The CORRECT alternative is:

Read the text below:

Men, women, and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fatal violence and victimization.

To study the potential differences that distinguish homicides involving women as victims or offenders from those involving men, we analyzed Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports data on homicides that occurred in the United States between 1976 and 1987. Only cases that involved victims aged 15 years or older were included. Persons killed during law enforcement activity and cases in which the victim's gender was not recorded were excluded. A total of 215,273 homicides were studied, 77% of which involved male victims and 23% female victims. Although the overall risk of homicide for women was substantially lower than that of men (rate ratio [RR] = 0.27), their risk of being killed by a spouse or intimate acquaintance was higher (RR = 1.23). In contrast to men, the killing of a woman by a stranger was rare (RR = 0.18). More than twice as many women were shot and killed by their husband or intimate acquaintance than were murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means. Although women comprise more than half the U.S. population, they committed only 14.7% of the homicides noted during the study interval. In contrast to men, who killed nonintimate acquaintances, strangers, or victims of undetermined relationship in 80% of cases, women killed their spouse, an intimate acquaintance, or a family member in 60% of cases. When men killed with a gun, they most commonly shot a stranger or a non-family acquaintance.

Disponível em: http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1635092. Acesso em: novembro de 2015.

According to the text, we can state that:

I. The objective was to identify the differences between homicides involving men and women.
II. Victims who were 19 years old were not included.
III. The risk of homicide for women is higher than for men.
IV. In the USA, there are more women than men.
V. They concluded that men kill and die more. 

Read the text and choose the best alternative.

Don’t Set Goals: Use Systems

Have you already set your goals for the New Year? Do you want to lose 10 kilos, run a marathon or speak fluent English? Some experts believe that you need systems, not goals. A system is something you do on a regular basis. This means focusing on what you can control (your actions) rather than what you can’t (the unpredictable). For example, don’t focus on losing 10 kilos, focus on shopping for healthy food and cooking something light every day. Don’t focus on the marathon; focus on the training schedule. Invent a system to improve your English, one step at a time. Good luck!

Disponível em: https://tinytexts.wordpress.com/. Acesso em: junho de 2015.

According to the text we can state that:

I. In order to achieve something you should focus on your actions.
II. In order to achieve something you should eat healthy food every day.
III. In order to achieve something you should set your systems for the New Year.
IV. In order to achieve something you should take one step at a time.

Read the text and answer the question.

Life stress may lead to cognitive developmental delays in children

According to a new study, children living in harsh or unstable environments are more likely to experience learning and cognitive delays by age 4.

Researchers examined the cortisol levels and cognitive delays of 201 children from low-income families in the northeastern United States. It was found that those kids with higher levels of cortisol experienced harsh or insensitive caregiving.

"We discovered that exposure to specific forms of family adversity when children were 2 years old predicted their cortisol profile, which in turn was linked with notable differences in children´s cognitive functioning at age 4," the researchers say.

Disponível em: http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=100733. Acesso em: 16/06/15.

According to the research, we can state that:

I. Children who are more stressed may have cognitive delay.
II. Children who are stresser may have developmental delays.
III. Children from more rich families were evaluated in this research.
IV. Children from richer families were evaluated in this research.
V. Children from poorer families were evaluated in this research.

Read the text and choose the best alternative.

Solar eclipse in Europe

The UK could be plunged into darkness next month, as experts warn there could be the biggest solar eclipse since 1999. Nearly 90% of the sun's rays are expected to be blocked out in parts of Europe on March 20th.

In London and the Southeast, 85% of the sun will be obscured by the moon, while in northern Scotland, more than 95% will be covered.

But the National Grid warns there could be a solar power outage as a result. Solar power isn’t widely used in the UK, but other parts of Europe that heavily rely on it could be out of electricity for a short while.

There's no need to worry, though – the European Network Transmission System Operators for Electricity have been planning for the event for months.

The eclipse will last for around two hours at 8:40 a.m. The next one will not be until 2026.

Disponível em: http://www.newsinlevels.com/products/solar-eclipse-in-europe-level-3/. Acesso em: março 2015.

Check the statements according to lexical-semantic aspects from the text above:

I. In: ‘The UK could be plunged into darkness next month…’, the verb in bold could be changed to ‘immersed’ without changing the meaning of the sentence.

II. The word ‘warn’ in the first paragraph means to make someone conscious of a possible problem or danger so they will not be hurt or affected by it.

III. In the sentence: ‘In London and the Southeast, 85% of the sun will be obscured by the moon, while in northern Scotland, more than 95% will be covered.’; the conjunction ‘while’ means that the same exact thing will be happening in the entire area.

IV. Read the sentence: ‘But the National Grid warns there could be a solar power outage as a result.’ The words in bold ‘as a result’ mean that a solar power outage could happen because of the solar eclipse.

V. The meaning of the word ‘eclipse’ in the last paragraph is ‘decline’.

Choose the CORRECT alternative.

Read the text and choose the best alternative for the underlined word.

Pictures of Ascent in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.

By Douglas Anderson.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. xi, 201 pp. $ 80.00.

The material world and the ability to transcend it are at the heart of this study of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. In chapters such as “Problems of Disposal” and “The Gravity of Things,” Anderson contrasts the “weight of living” present in Poe’s life and work with, in Italo Calvino’s words, the “lightness of thoughtfulness.” This book provides a taxonomy of Poe’s literary imagination through suggestive literary analyses of the fictive environments that inhabit and undergird his stories, and it expands the purview of Poe studies as well as of nineteenth-century American literature.

Available in: http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/82/3/663.full.pdf. Access on: August 2015.

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