Questões de Inglês

Rate of marriages in China lowest since record keeping began in 1986, with cost of living and pushback against traditional gender roles contributing factors. Marriages in China plunged 20% to a record low in 2024 as young people resisted government efforts to convince them to settle down and have more babies. Marriages in China dropped from 7.7m in 2023 to 6.1m last year, data from China’s civil affairs ministry showed. The figure was less than half the number registered in 2013, and the lowest since record keeping began in 1986. The data also showed that 2.6 million couples filed for divorce in 2024, up 1.1% from the previous year. The sharp dive in nuptials was amplified by 2023’s brief rebound as people caught up on weddings after several years of Covid restrictions. There was also speculation that people had avoided getting married in 2024 because it was an inauspicious “widow year” in the Chinese lunar calendar. But the broader trend remained on track – stubbornly resisting the ruling Communist party’s push to reverse China’s demographic decline. “It’s not that people don’t want to get married, but that they can’t afford to get married!” said one Changzhou-based commenter on China’s social media platform Weibo, which has had more than 46 million engagements about the topic since Monday. China has the world’s second-largest population and for decades enforced tight restrictions on childbirth, including a one-child policy. But now, as China faces a decreasing and ageing population, which threatens the country’s economic future, the authoritarian government wants people to have more children.

Disponível em: https://www.theguardian.com/. Acesso em: 15 fev. 2025.

According to the text,

A radio-frequency-identification (RFID) antenna printed on paper.

Jing Liu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said his team's advance—published May 9 in the journal Scientific Reports—could be a leap forward in the booming business of printed electronics. “This brand-new technique offers a vital opportunity to realize rapid fabrication of inexpensive, disposable, conveniently portable circuits and functional components," he said, adding that the process could help "pave the way toward personal printed electronics." […] Jing and colleagues developed a new metal-based ink that could work at room temperatures. Their initial formula caused the ink to ball up into droplets, which made it difficult to apply and adhere to the paper. So the team modified the ink by injecting the liquid metal alloy with oxygen, making it more suitable for printing on the kind of paper used for book covers, labels, and advertising stock. A newly developed brush—like a porous pinhead—was also developed to deliver the slow-flowing ink that would clog more conventional printers. While most electronic inks solidify after printing, the one employed by the researchers remains liquid and is encapsulated by a second coating of silicone rubber—this creates a channel to hold the ink.

Disponível em: https://www.nationalgeographic.comasserção. Acesso em: 26 Jan. 2025.

According to the text,

  I. In the future, you may be able to manufacture electronic circuits yourself using your desktop printer.

  II. The new metal-based ink developed by Jin's team still faces adhesion issues with the paper.

  III. The brush developed was designed to deliver the right amount of ink for printing book covers.

  IV. Creating a channel to hold the ink was made possible by a coating of silicone rubber.

Assinale a alternativa que apresenta apenas asserções CORRETAS.

Wildlife photographer Ingo Arndt discovered his first enormous ant mound as a child exploring the forest with his father near their home in Germany almost 50 years ago. The mound was covered with a thick layer of spruce needles and throngs of tiny red ants.

Outfitted with a high-resolution camera and macro lenses that allow you to focus on small objects up close, he began photographing the mounds and sharing his imagery with researchers for a scientific perspective. It turned out the mound makers were indeed special. They were red wood ants—scientifically classified as a group within the genus Formica—one of the smallest of all so-called keystone species.

[…] the ants generate formic acid in a venom gland at the rear of their abdomen. As they build a nest, the insects will gather tree resin, which has been shown to possess antimicrobial properties, and spray it with their acid, which has its own antimicrobial properties. The result is a more potent agent that the ants place throughout the structure to fight against bacterial and fungal pathogens.

Formic acid also powers the species’ pest-control role. The fluid can be weaponized to take down other insects, like wood-boring beetles, one of the most destructive vermin in spruce forests. The fighting tactic, Seifert explains, involves “biting them and then spraying formic acid into the wounds.” Reducing the number of beetles that weaken and destroy trees improves conditions for aphids living in them. The ants “milk” the aphids to excrete honeydew, which becomes their primary food source.

Disponível em: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/. Acesso em: 18 jan. 2025.

What has Ingo Arndt discovered about the role of ants in our environment?

Many ocean experts and marine biologists have raised alarm at the rate at which fish supplies are dwindling, especially in certain bodies of water. Some bodies of water may already be past the point of no return, the experts say. This includes the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, which Anderson calls the “c,” and the Black Sea, which is dominated by jellyfish as a result of overharvesting and pollution from Soviet-era industry. Yet another problem for fish populations, Mittermeier notes, is that the ocean’s chemistry is rapidly changing due to increasing saturation of carbon (which comes in part from the carbon dioxide in the air), coupled with the surge of freshwater from melting ice and compounded by the drive to catch as many fish as possible. This means that “several fish populations have already disappeared and will never recover.” Surprisingly, the biggest threat to fish in our oceans is not pollution, although it does play a significant role, especially in this era of micro-plastics,” says Mittermeier. What is the biggest threat then? “It is actually something many people have never even heard about, and that is government subsidies, the policy many governments have of subsidizing large fishing fleets to catch ever-diminishing stocks.” Mittermeier explains that in Spain, for example, one in three fish caught is paid for by a government subsidy. “Some governments seem more concerned with keeping jobs alive in the fishing industry in the short-term than they are about the long-term health of our oceans,” she says. The United States has a range of fishing subsidies that critics say drive fishing to excessive levels.

Disponível em: https://www.rd.com/. Acesso em: 4 jan. 2025.

According to the text, the most meaningful threat to fish in our oceans comes from

Picture this: You answer a phone call one day and hear a voice that sounds like your child. They tell you that they have been kidnapped and need cash for a ransom right away. You scramble to help—only to realize that the voice on the other end of the line isn’t your child but rather part of a sophisticated, terrifying new AI call. Imposter scams have been around for years, but artificial intelligence has made them more sophisticated and convincing. “AI did not change much in terms of why people do scams—it just provided a new avenue to execute them,” Madry says. “Be it blackmail, scam or misinformation or disinformation, all now can be much cheaper to execute and more persuasive. “While AI has been around for decades for both criminal and everyday use—think: AI password cracking and AI assistants like Alexa and Siri—it was expensive and required a massive amount of computing power to run. As a result, shady characters needed a lot of time and expertise with specialized software to impersonate someone’s voice using AI. “Now, all of this is available for anyone who just spends some time watching tutorials on YouTube or reading how-to docs and is willing to tinker a bit with the AI systems they can download from the internet,” says Madry. On top of that, Velasquez notes that previous imposter phone scams used to blame a poor connection or bad accident to explain why their voice sounded different. But today’s technology “has become so good that it is almost impossible for the human ear to be able to tell that the voice on the other end of the phone is not the person it purports to be,” says Alex Hamerstone, a director with the security-consulting firm TrustedSec.

Disponível em: https://www.rd.com/. Acesso em: 4 jan. 2025.

According to the text, mark the statement that best describes the main reason why it is difficult to stop AI scams.

According to Roman mythology, Cupid was a god born of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, and Venus, the goddess of love. Armed with a bow and arrows, he dealt in love and passion, forcing it upon his victims with the prick of an arrow. The Valentine Cupid you can easily call to mind is an interpretation of Eros, the Greek god of love. He appeared as a handsome youth in early art and poetry, but by the Hellenistic period—which spanned from 323 B.C.E. to 31 B.C.E.—he’d morphed into the chubby winged child we know and love today. “Representing Eros as a child, and subordinate to his mother, is a way of containing or limiting the power that love was thought to have over us,” says Connors. So what does Eros have to do with Cupid? A lot. The Romans reinterpreted many Greek myths, and Eros is no exception. Once he was adopted by Roman culture, he was renamed Cupid, which stems from the word for “desire.” While his name may have changed, the Romans kept Cupid’s more recent Greek incarnation of the less threatening, chubby-cheeked child. Modern representations often conflate Eros and Cupid in the version of the Valentine’s Day Cupid that screams “Happy Valentine’s Day” today.

Disponível em: https://www.rd.com/. Acesso em: 4 jan. 2025.

According to the text, Cupid is represented as a baby because