Questões de Inglês

Crystal Ball

Come see your life in my crystal glass –
Twenty–five cents is all you pay.
Let me look into your past –
Heres what you had for lunch today:
Tuna salad and mashed potatoes,
Collard greens pea soup and apple juice,
Chocolate milk and lemon mousse.
You admit Ive got told it all?
Well, I know it, I confess,
Not by looking, in my ball,
But just by looking at your dress. 

SILVERSTEIN, S. Falling up. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.

 

A curiosidade a respeito do futuro pode exercer um fascínio peculiar sobre algumas pessoas, a ponto de colocá-las em situações inusitadas.

 

Na letra da música Crystal Ball, essa situação fica evidente quando é revelado à pessoa que ela

The record industry

The record industry is undoubtedly in crisis, with labels laying off employees in continuation. This is because CD sales are plummeting as youngsters prefer to download their music from the Internet, usually free of charge.

And yet it´s not all gloom and doom. Some labels are in fact thriving. Putumayo World Music, for example, is growing, thanks to its catalogue of ethnic compilation albums, featuring work by largely unknown artists from around the planet.

Putumayo, which takes its name from a valley in Colombia, was founded in New York in 1993. It began life as an alternative clothing company, but soon decided to concentrate on music.

Indeed its growth appears to have coincided with that of world music as a genre. Speak Up. Ano XXIII, nº 275 (fragmento).

A indústria fonográfica passou por várias mudanças no século XX e, como consequência, as empresas enfrentaram crises. Entre as causas, o texto da revista Speak Up aponta

Text I

 

"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people.

Now a team of scientists has gone a step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. They recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings, they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.

Little babies produce wails that vary in pitch. Since most of us have heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, we tend not to think twice about the pattern of pitch changes. But that is not what the scientists found. French babies tended to cry "with a rising melody contour". The pitch changed from low to high, rising toward the end of words as well as phrases within a sentence. In contrast, the German babies' cries had falling melodic contours. The pitch fell from high to low, which is consistent with the sound of German's falling melody contour, from the accented high-pitch syllable at the start of a phrase or word to the lower pitch at the end of a phrase. There is, in short, "a tendency for infants to utter melody contours similar to those perceived prenatally," write the scientists.

"The impressive finding of this study is that not only are [newborns] capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester," said the research leader. "Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

It had been thought that babies' cries are constrained by their breathing patterns and respiratory apparatus, in which case a crying baby would sound like a crying baby no matter what the culture, since babies are anatomically identical. "The prevailing opinion used to be that newborns could not actively influence their production of sound," says researcher. This study refutes that claim: since babies cry in different languages, they must have some control over what they sound like rather than being constrained by the acoustical properties of their lungs, throat, mouth, and larynx.

The idea of the study wasn't to make the sound of a screaming baby more interesting to listeners but to explore how babies acquire speech. That acquisition, it is now clear, begins months before birth, probably in the third trimester. Until this study, scientists thought that babies became capable of vocal imitation no earlier than 12 weeks of age. That's when infants listening to an adult speaker producing vowels can parrot the sound. But that's the beginning of true speech.

Source: Newsweek (Adapted from: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357, November/2009)

According to the text, identify the true (T) and the false (F) statement (s):

( ) Researchers think that babies happen to able of vocal imitation no earlier than one year of age.
( ) Scientists believe that a crying baby melody depends on the culture, since babies are anatomically different.
( ) Newborn produces cry melody patterns that are characteristic of the language they have noticed during their fetal life.

The correct sequence is:

Text I

 

"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people.

Now a team of scientists has gone a step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. They recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings, they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.

Little babies produce wails that vary in pitch. Since most of us have heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, we tend not to think twice about the pattern of pitch changes. But that is not what the scientists found. French babies tended to cry "with a rising melody contour". The pitch changed from low to high, rising toward the end of words as well as phrases within a sentence. In contrast, the German babies' cries had falling melodic contours. The pitch fell from high to low, which is consistent with the sound of German's falling melody contour, from the accented high-pitch syllable at the start of a phrase or word to the lower pitch at the end of a phrase. There is, in short, "a tendency for infants to utter melody contours similar to those perceived prenatally," write the scientists.

"The impressive finding of this study is that not only are [newborns] capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester," said the research leader. "Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

It had been thought that babies' cries are constrained by their breathing patterns and respiratory apparatus, in which case a crying baby would sound like a crying baby no matter what the culture, since babies are anatomically identical. "The prevailing opinion used to be that newborns could not actively influence their production of sound," says researcher. This study refutes that claim: since babies cry in different languages, they must have some control over what they sound like rather than being constrained by the acoustical properties of their lungs, throat, mouth, and larynx.

The idea of the study wasn't to make the sound of a screaming baby more interesting to listeners but to explore how babies acquire speech. That acquisition, it is now clear, begins months before birth, probably in the third trimester. Until this study, scientists thought that babies became capable of vocal imitation no earlier than 12 weeks of age. That's when infants listening to an adult speaker producing vowels can parrot the sound. But that's the beginning of true speech.

Source: Newsweek (Adapted from: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357, November/2009)

Choose the appropriate question tag for the following sentence:

“We’ve heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, ____________?” 

Text I

 

"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people.

Now a team of scientists has gone a step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. They recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings, they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.

Little babies produce wails that vary in pitch. Since most of us have heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, we tend not to think twice about the pattern of pitch changes. But that is not what the scientists found. French babies tended to cry "with a rising melody contour". The pitch changed from low to high, rising toward the end of words as well as phrases within a sentence. In contrast, the German babies' cries had falling melodic contours. The pitch fell from high to low, which is consistent with the sound of German's falling melody contour, from the accented high-pitch syllable at the start of a phrase or word to the lower pitch at the end of a phrase. There is, in short, "a tendency for infants to utter melody contours similar to those perceived prenatally," write the scientists.

"The impressive finding of this study is that not only are [newborns] capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester," said the research leader. "Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

It had been thought that babies' cries are constrained by their breathing patterns and respiratory apparatus, in which case a crying baby would sound like a crying baby no matter what the culture, since babies are anatomically identical. "The prevailing opinion used to be that newborns could not actively influence their production of sound," says researcher. This study refutes that claim: since babies cry in different languages, they must have some control over what they sound like rather than being constrained by the acoustical properties of their lungs, throat, mouth, and larynx.

The idea of the study wasn't to make the sound of a screaming baby more interesting to listeners but to explore how babies acquire speech. That acquisition, it is now clear, begins months before birth, probably in the third trimester. Until this study, scientists thought that babies became capable of vocal imitation no earlier than 12 weeks of age. That's when infants listening to an adult speaker producing vowels can parrot the sound. But that's the beginning of true speech.

Source: Newsweek (Adapted from: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357, November/2009)

What is the best title for the text?

Text I

 

"Crying baby" and "music" don't usually go together, but interesting science starts with questions no one else thought to ask—in this case, what are the musical contours of a newborn's cry? There had already been research on what sounds a fetus can hear in the womb and what effect that has right after birth, with several research teams finding that newborns prefer their mothers' voices over those of other people.

Now a team of scientists has gone a step further: they have found that newborns cry in their native language. They recorded 2,500 cries of newborn babies, 30 French and 30 German, between 2 and 5 days old. The idea was to extend the existing findings about what sounds babies can perceive—their native language, their mother's voice—to test what sounds they can create. Once the researchers had their recordings, they set to work analyzing the cries' melodic qualities.

Little babies produce wails that vary in pitch. Since most of us have heard only the cries of babies whose parents speak our language, we tend not to think twice about the pattern of pitch changes. But that is not what the scientists found. French babies tended to cry "with a rising melody contour". The pitch changed from low to high, rising toward the end of words as well as phrases within a sentence. In contrast, the German babies' cries had falling melodic contours. The pitch fell from high to low, which is consistent with the sound of German's falling melody contour, from the accented high-pitch syllable at the start of a phrase or word to the lower pitch at the end of a phrase. There is, in short, "a tendency for infants to utter melody contours similar to those perceived prenatally," write the scientists.

"The impressive finding of this study is that not only are [newborns] capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester," said the research leader. "Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

It had been thought that babies' cries are constrained by their breathing patterns and respiratory apparatus, in which case a crying baby would sound like a crying baby no matter what the culture, since babies are anatomically identical. "The prevailing opinion used to be that newborns could not actively influence their production of sound," says researcher. This study refutes that claim: since babies cry in different languages, they must have some control over what they sound like rather than being constrained by the acoustical properties of their lungs, throat, mouth, and larynx.

The idea of the study wasn't to make the sound of a screaming baby more interesting to listeners but to explore how babies acquire speech. That acquisition, it is now clear, begins months before birth, probably in the third trimester. Until this study, scientists thought that babies became capable of vocal imitation no earlier than 12 weeks of age. That's when infants listening to an adult speaker producing vowels can parrot the sound. But that's the beginning of true speech.

Source: Newsweek (Adapted from: http://www.newsweek.com/id/221357, November/2009)

Choose the item which best completes the sentence bellow:

“If respiration alone dictated what a cry sounded like, all babies would cry with a falling-pitch pattern, since that\'s what ___________ as you run out of breath and air pressure on the throat\'s sound-making machinery __________.”