Questões de Inglês

FOR CATS, A BIG GULP WITH A TOUCH OF THE TONGUE

 

  It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose. Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured. The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism. Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.

  Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton. Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces. What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.

  The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it. Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it. The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second. Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed. To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.

WADE, Nicholas. For cats, a big gulp with a touch of the tongue. Disponível em: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/science/12cats.html?_r=1&hpw> Acesso em: 20 nov. 2010.

The main goal of the scientific text above is to reveal how:

Leia o seguinte trecho.

 

―...The frenzy to collect more of those votes is causing Lula’s left-wing workers party to mull whether to back off its commitment to see abortion rights debated in congress,...‖

Dentre as alternativas apresentadas, qual a que melhor traduz para o português as palavras grifadas?

The adverb “mistakenly” is between quotations in the cartoon above because there is the evidence of...

What is the implicit situation between images and words in the editorial cartoon? It is correct to say that:

Why Children Use Drugs

 

Parents often think that friends or drug dealers may have pressured their child into taking drugs. But children say that they choose to use drugs because they want to:

 

• (1) boredom

• Feel good

• Forget their troubles and relax

• (2) fun

• Satisfy their curiosity

• Take risks

• (3) pain

• Feel grown-up

• (4) their independence

• (5) to a specific group and look cool

Parents know their children best and are therefore in the best position to suggest healthy alternatives to doing drugs. Encouraging children to become involved in sports, clubs, music lessons, community service projects, church, and other after-school activities can keep children and teens active and interested, while building their confidence and interpersonal skills. These activities will also bring youth closer to parents and to other adults and peers who can influence them in positive ways.

Disponível em:< http://www.yic.gov/drugfree/whykiduse.htm>. Acesso em: 03 ago. 2010.

Choose a sentence which is similar in meaning to: “Parents know their children best and are therefore in the best position to suggest healthy alternatives to doing drugs.”

Why Children Use Drugs

 

Parents often think that friends or drug dealers may have pressured their child into taking drugs. But children say that they choose to use drugs because they want to:

 

• (1) boredom

• Feel good

• Forget their troubles and relax

• (2) fun

• Satisfy their curiosity

• Take risks

• (3) pain

• Feel grown-up

• (4) their independence

• (5) to a specific group and look cool

Parents know their children best and are therefore in the best position to suggest healthy alternatives to doing drugs. Encouraging children to become involved in sports, clubs, music lessons, community service projects, church, and other after-school activities can keep children and teens active and interested, while building their confidence and interpersonal skills. These activities will also bring youth closer to parents and to other adults and peers who can influence them in positive ways.

Disponível em:< http://www.yic.gov/drugfree/whykiduse.htm>. Acesso em: 03 ago. 2010.

The sentence: “Parents often think that…” has the same meaning as: