Questões de Inglês

    Returning to my hometown is an occasion not to worry about street parking or dinner reservations. But on April 8 — thanks to the region’s position in the path of the total solar eclipse — I’ll be among the throngs of out-of-towners donning funky glasses to watch the sun disappear behind the moon’s shadow. In a small town in the USA a judge has already declared a state of emergency in anticipation of the population doubling or tripling in the days leading up to the eclipse. Maybe you don’t plan to be among the solar pilgrims battling highway gridlock. Maybe you are wondering if people have lost their minds. Why all the fuss about a predictable alignment of the Earth, moon and sun?

    Here’s a reason to give in to eclipse-mania. Post-pandemic, many of us feel less a part of our communities. In a polarized world, we lack common cause. Amid this disconnection and alienation, a solar eclipse is an opportunity not only for awe and wonder— but for binding ourselves to the past and future of humanity.

     People have been looking up to the stars for answers for millennia, whether it was to know the will of their gods or to navigate their ships across unknown seas. The solar eclipse carried omens for the ancient Mayans and Greeks. We can only imagine what it might mean to our descendants in the future, or to the artificial intelligence overlords that might govern them. What we do know is that total eclipses will recur for the next half-billion years, and that as long as people inhabit Earth, these events will be a spectacle if only for their rarity.

    Total solar eclipses happen about once every year to three years, but most are visible only from the poles or the middle of the ocean. From any specific location, they can be seen just about once every four centuries. They are one thing about the foreseeable future that, despite the dramatic technological and planetary changes ahead, will remain consistent with our past. This is why a trip to see the eclipse will be a trip home even for those not raised in the path of this year’s event. It will be a chance to be reminded of our place in the solar system and the cosmos — something that, no matter how stark our differences, we still share.

Disponível em https://www.washingtonpost.com/. Adaptado.

    Gossip may not be good for you, per se, but it’s deeply connected to human nature.

    The historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote that gossip helped early Homo sapiens form larger and more stable bands. He borrowed the idea from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that language — and by extension, gossip — replaced grooming, a social bonding practice still seen among our primate cousins.

    Humans needed something that would help them keep upto-date with friends and family as they spread out across distances, and networks of Homo sapiens were becoming too large for everyone to effectively groom everyone else.

    Or, to put it another way, humans evolved to gossip. The language of social bonding is thought to play a pivotal part in ensuring our survival and later flourishing.

    Gossip’s ability to drive “vicarious learning” and facilitate “social connection” was the subject of a recent study by scientists at Dartmouth’s Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.

    Luke Chang, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, explained that he and his co-researcher, Eshin Jolly, dug into the topic because gossip is ubiquitous but not well-studied.

    They created a game where individuals received small amounts of money and were divided into groups of six. Each round, an individual could choose to keep the money or put it into a pot, benefiting everyone. To replicate the societal pressures of gossip, they gave the players the option to exchange private communications, which inevitably turned into a way for people to size up who was hoarding or who was contributing.

    “Our work suggests that there’s a lot more richness there than we’re willing to think about,” Mr. Jolly said. “When I’m talking with you about somebody, even if it’s negative or positive, it’s this idea that we’ve decided to temperature check how we feel about the social world at large.”

The New York Times,¬28 May, 2021. Adaptado.

    How to Pick Up the Local Language Before You Go

www.nytimes.com

Speaking — even trying to speak — a language will help open doors on your next trip, and achieving a “survival level” might be easier than you think.

Weston Wei

There are plenty of reasons to learn a foreign language before you travel. Perhaps you’re venturing beyond major tourist centers, or you want to be prepared for emergencies. Whatever the reason, speaking even a few words of the local language with residents can quickly elevate you from mere tourist to sympathetic traveler.

“This tiny interaction instantly connects you,” said Mary Green, vice president and executive editor of Pimsleur Language Programs, in an email. “That’s the feeling travelers are chasing. You’re not just passing through, but actually engaging and connecting.”

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to learn languages, and getting started is affordable, or even free.

Start simply and build from there

Aim to reach a “survival level” before you travel. That means abandoning your inhibitions and not getting hung up on grammar or achieving proficiency, said Thomas Sauer, assistant director of resource development for the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. Travelers can connect and communicate surprisingly well at this level, which he described as a speaking style, akin to that of a toddler, that gets the point across.

For Brandon Shaw, a co-owner of the Tour Guy, a company providing specialized tours in Europe and North America, reaching survival level means focusing on a core of essential verbs (words like “go,” “see,” “eat,” “drink,” “have,” “do” and “be”), then learning a small vocabulary of other words centered on your particular interests for a given trip.

“Then you can literally build a hundred sentences around that,” Mr. Shaw said.

Learning those “right words” doesn’t happen overnight. Getting beyond the transactional tourist tropes of “Where’s the bathroom?” and “Check, please,” for example, can take anywhere from one to three months of daily practice, although everyone learns differently. As with a fitness program, you get out of language study what you put in. The trick is finding what works for you.

(Taken from www.nytimes.com. Access: October, 2025)

    How to Pick Up the Local Language Before You Go

www.nytimes.com

Speaking — even trying to speak — a language will help open doors on your next trip, and achieving a “survival level” might be easier than you think.

Weston Wei

There are plenty of reasons to learn a foreign language before you travel. Perhaps you’re venturing beyond major tourist centers, or you want to be prepared for emergencies. Whatever the reason, speaking even a few words of the local language with residents can quickly elevate you from mere tourist to sympathetic traveler.

“This tiny interaction instantly connects you,” said Mary Green, vice president and executive editor of Pimsleur Language Programs, in an email. “That’s the feeling travelers are chasing. You’re not just passing through, but actually engaging and connecting.”

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to learn languages, and getting started is affordable, or even free.

Start simply and build from there

Aim to reach a “survival level” before you travel. That means abandoning your inhibitions and not getting hung up on grammar or achieving proficiency, said Thomas Sauer, assistant director of resource development for the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. Travelers can connect and communicate surprisingly well at this level, which he described as a speaking style, akin to that of a toddler, that gets the point across.

For Brandon Shaw, a co-owner of the Tour Guy, a company providing specialized tours in Europe and North America, reaching survival level means focusing on a core of essential verbs (words like “go,” “see,” “eat,” “drink,” “have,” “do” and “be”), then learning a small vocabulary of other words centered on your particular interests for a given trip.

“Then you can literally build a hundred sentences around that,” Mr. Shaw said.

Learning those “right words” doesn’t happen overnight. Getting beyond the transactional tourist tropes of “Where’s the bathroom?” and “Check, please,” for example, can take anywhere from one to three months of daily practice, although everyone learns differently. As with a fitness program, you get out of language study what you put in. The trick is finding what works for you.

(Taken from www.nytimes.com. Access: October, 2025)

Hamnet – Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley beguile and captivate in audacious Shakespearean tragedy

[1]    Chloé Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-
making novel powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a 
child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama. 
    ‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs 
[5] and fears…” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and 
Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than 
ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé 
Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of 
William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s 
[10] beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his 
wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son 
Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the 
play’s first performance. 
    The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some 
[15] monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that 
the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is 
inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same 
name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as 
well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the 
[20] Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. 
This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but 
because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and 
speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same 
time. 
[25]   On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, 
based on treating Shakespeare like you would a 
contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the 
speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily 
on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a 
[30] coincidence. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic 
themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. 
(Shakespeare’s horror at the death of Hamnet could have 
remained dormant for more years than this, and then 
surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff’s wife and 
[35] young son.) You can remain unconvinced. And yet there is 
such terrific daring in Zhao and O’Farrell’s stretch: a 
thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the 
centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human 
beings. 
[40]  Zhao takes her movie at walking pace at first, following 
Agnes as she wanders endlessly through a forest, a habit 
that has earned her a witch-like reputation like her late 
mother, dreamily registering the sky through the branches 
and a hawk that has swooped down to her hand. Agnes is 
[45] in a trance of rapture in the folk-horror woodland outside 
Stratford-upon-Avon, a premonition of creative inspiration 
from the depths of despair. It is an unselfconsciously 
beguiling performance from Jessie Buckley, who gives 
every look and smile a piercing significance. Her beauty 
[50] captivates young William Shakespeare, a would-be poet 
seething at having to follow his abusive father into the 
gloving business, and played with intelligent force by Paul 
Mescal. 
    They marry, to the deep unease of William’s mother 
[55] Mary (Emily Watson), and the film imagines Agnes having 
her first baby (Susanna) actually in the forest. But when 
she reaches the end of her second pregnancy, she is forced 
to give birth indoors, a bad augury; these are the twins 
Judith and Hamnet. And while William is away in London 
[60] following his dream of becoming a star of the London 
playhouse, illness and calamity strike. 
    The death of Hamnet could be compared to that of 
Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughters from sickness early 
in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; it is an inciting event, a 
[65] terrible event which in some sense explains everything 
that happens next. Cromwell had to cauterise his inner 
agony by throwing himself into his career, pursuing it 
ruthlessly and making it of overwhelming importance – but 
he did not dwell on those that he has lost as Shakespeare 
[70] is supposed to be doing here. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest 
that Shakespeare transformed and displaced his grief into 
every line of his play: the agony, the futility of carrying on, 
the dazed inability to decide on the point of anything. In a 
way, he, Shakespeare, is the ghost, the undead phantom 
[75] condemned to wander miserably through the world while 
Hamnet is left alive. The boy’s soul has not been murdered 
as the father’s has. 
    It could all be true – although it comes down to the 
name, and there is a line in Romeo and Juliet about what 
[80] there is in a name. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is 
beautiful and pellucid and Max Richter’s score swarms all 

around the action. It is a film that moves because of the 
performances which are so absorbing. 
    Decades ago, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and 
[85] Guildenstern Are Dead provided a whole new way into 
Hamlet. Perhaps Zhao and O’Farrell will do the same thing 
with this tender and moving new creation myth.. 

Hamnet – Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley beguile and captivate in audacious Shakespearean tragedy

[1]    Chloé Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-
making novel powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a 
child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama. 
    ‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs 
[5] and fears…” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and 
Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than 
ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé 
Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of 
William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s 
[10] beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his 
wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son 
Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the 
play’s first performance. 
    The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some 
[15] monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that 
the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is 
inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same 
name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as 
well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the 
[20] Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. 
This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but 
because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and 
speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same 
time. 
[25]   On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, 
based on treating Shakespeare like you would a 
contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the 
speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily 
on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a 
[30] coincidence. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic 
themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. 
(Shakespeare’s horror at the death of Hamnet could have 
remained dormant for more years than this, and then 
surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff’s wife and 
[35] young son.) You can remain unconvinced. And yet there is 
such terrific daring in Zhao and O’Farrell’s stretch: a 
thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the 
centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human 
beings. 
[40]  Zhao takes her movie at walking pace at first, following 
Agnes as she wanders endlessly through a forest, a habit 
that has earned her a witch-like reputation like her late 
mother, dreamily registering the sky through the branches 
and a hawk that has swooped down to her hand. Agnes is 
[45] in a trance of rapture in the folk-horror woodland outside 
Stratford-upon-Avon, a premonition of creative inspiration 
from the depths of despair. It is an unselfconsciously 
beguiling performance from Jessie Buckley, who gives 
every look and smile a piercing significance. Her beauty 
[50] captivates young William Shakespeare, a would-be poet 
seething at having to follow his abusive father into the 
gloving business, and played with intelligent force by Paul 
Mescal. 
    They marry, to the deep unease of William’s mother 
[55] Mary (Emily Watson), and the film imagines Agnes having 
her first baby (Susanna) actually in the forest. But when 
she reaches the end of her second pregnancy, she is forced 
to give birth indoors, a bad augury; these are the twins 
Judith and Hamnet. And while William is away in London 
[60] following his dream of becoming a star of the London 
playhouse, illness and calamity strike. 
    The death of Hamnet could be compared to that of 
Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughters from sickness early 
in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; it is an inciting event, a 
[65] terrible event which in some sense explains everything 
that happens next. Cromwell had to cauterise his inner 
agony by throwing himself into his career, pursuing it 
ruthlessly and making it of overwhelming importance – but 
he did not dwell on those that he has lost as Shakespeare 
[70] is supposed to be doing here. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest 
that Shakespeare transformed and displaced his grief into 
every line of his play: the agony, the futility of carrying on, 
the dazed inability to decide on the point of anything. In a 
way, he, Shakespeare, is the ghost, the undead phantom 
[75] condemned to wander miserably through the world while 
Hamnet is left alive. The boy’s soul has not been murdered 
as the father’s has. 
    It could all be true – although it comes down to the 
name, and there is a line in Romeo and Juliet about what 
[80] there is in a name. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is 
beautiful and pellucid and Max Richter’s score swarms all 

around the action. It is a film that moves because of the 
performances which are so absorbing. 
    Decades ago, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and 
[85] Guildenstern Are Dead provided a whole new way into 
Hamlet. Perhaps Zhao and O’Farrell will do the same thing 
with this tender and moving new creation myth..