Questões de Inglês

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This couple’s jungle honeymoon became a total nightmare

by Jane Ridley

[1]    It was the going to be a weeklong romantic adventure for Holly Fitzgerald, now 71, and her husband,
Fitz, 70, rafting like Huck Finn down a fast-flowing tributary of the Amazon. Instead, it wound up becoming
a nearly month long ordeal, stranding two honeymooners on a parasite-ridden lake in the Bolivian jungle
– with nothing to eat but slugs, snails and frogs.
[5]    The epic tale began in February 1973, five months into the couple’s yearlong honeymoon backpacking
around South America. There was a general plan to reach Rio de Janeiro and then board a ship bound
for Africa, but the newlyweds were frequently sidetracked while meeting interesting people en route. One
such encounter, with some anthropologists, aroused their curiosity about the Amazon basin. So they
booked seats on a small plane to the Peruvian frontier town of Puerto Maldonado. It would be their first
[10] mistake. “The wobbly plane began to descend very fast, pushing me sideways, causing me to grasp the
seat,” Holly writes in her book. “We were thrown back and forth, held by our wide seat belts . . . I caught
sight of the plane’s right wing and engine out of the window. They’d been snapped entirely.”
    The DC-3 – with 13 people onboard – crash-landed in the jungle. Incredibly, no one was badly hurt
in the accident, which was likely a result of pilot error. The survivors were escorted across a river to the
[15] nearest shelter: an open penal colony full of convicted murderers and rapists. Although the passengers
slept in separate barracks from the inmates, there was a sense of menace in the air. Despite daily promises
from prison guards that help was on the way, it was four long days before a plane appeared on the muddy
pasture that served as a runway. When they finally reached Puerto Maldonado, the Fitzgeralds discovered

they’d missed their boat to Bolivia. It was flood season, and the next available trip downriver was likely
[20] three months away.
    Encouraged by locals, the young couple decided to build a raft – using four logs and a makeshift tent
fashioned from plastic sheeting lined with mosquito netting – and navigate 500 miles of the Madre de
Dios river to Riberalta, Bolivia, themselves. “At first, it was idyllic,” recalled Holly, who reveled in the jungle
scents of ripe mangoes and gardenia.
[25]    However, on their fourth night, fortunes changed. While the couple was sleeping, a raging thunderstorm
brewed. Torrential rain pelted the tent, threatening its collapse. “Just then, something slammed the bow,
pulling the raft downwards,” Holly writes. She heard the horror-movie rip of the plastic tent as a large tree
trunk crashed through, pinning her to the raft. Her husband struggled to pull the tree off her as the small
watercraft rocked back and forth, threatening to capsize at any second.
[30]    Once the storm quieted, the sun soon came up to reveal a frightening reality: The couple were now
off course, with no idea of their location. “We didn’t know it at the time, but we were stranded in the middle
of a swamp – a seasonal lake formed because of flooding,” said Holly. “Most of our food and supplies had
fallen overboard during the night. Our tent was ripped to shreds, so we had to replace it with spare plastic
sheeting we’d managed to hold onto”.
[35]    As the land around them was submerged, there was no question of getting anywhere on foot. Tying
the raft and their few remaining possessions to a bush above the water line, the duo swam for hours at a
time – only to travel less than half a mile. They gave up after trying for two days.
    For 26 days, they were marooned – knowing no one was looking for them, as they had written to their
family that they’d be exploring for at least a month. The couple were besieged by bees, mosquitoes and
[40] other biting insects. They tried to catch fish but had zero luck. Strange noises from the jungle terrified
them at night, and they felt themselves weaken by the hour. Holly and Fitz became skeletal and frequently
doubled over in pain because of the lack of food. One morning, Holly initially couldn’t wake her husband
and feared he had died in his sleep.
    On their 26th day in the swamp, Holly had a premonition. “We’re going to make it out of here. I just
[45] know it,” she told her ailing husband, who lost 40 pounds during the ordeal. (Holly herself shed 20 pounds.)
Hours later, after nearly a month of not seeing a single soul, they spotted two Indians hunting turtles from
a canoe. Using made-up hand signs and broken Spanish, the honeymooners convinced the men to take
them to their village. They later traveled to their original destination of Riberalta.
    Over the next two weeks, the Fitzgeralds were treated in a hospital for exhaustion, severe malnutrition,
[50] and the bites and stings they’d received. In April 1973, they finally returned home.
    Remarkably, their brush with death didn’t curb the couple’s enthusiasm for travel. They have since
visited far-flung destinations including Bali, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Sudan and the Himalayas. “With hindsight,
it does seem rather bold to have taken the raft on such a big river, but I can’t say I have deep regrets,” said
Holly. “The whole experience brought Fitz and I closer together. 

Disponível em: https://nypost.com/2017/07/22/this-couples-jungle-honeymoon-became-a-total-nightmare/. Acesso em: 10 ago. 2021. (Parcial e
adaptado.)

Instrução: A questão refere-se ao texto abaixo.

Virginia Hall

by Sonia Purnell

    When Gina Haspel became the first female director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
2018, she talked of how she had stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim”.
She was “deeply indebted”, she said, to women who had served the agency and its wartime predecessor
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for making her appointment possible by challenging stereotypes
[5] and breaking down barriers. Perhaps no woman is a better illustration of that history than Virginia Hall, a
one-legged socialite from Baltimore, USA, whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most
successful American female spy of the Second World War.
    Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land
the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA. It has only been comparatively recently that the
[10] agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a
citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. The agency has also now named a training building
after her. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered
from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.
    Born to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the
[15] age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. Despite her raft
of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been
repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women as well as the disabled.
    So, as war loomed in 1939, she resigned in disgust from her clerk role at the American legation
in the Baltic state of Estonia to embark on what would become a Homeric tale of adventure, action and
[20] seemingly unfathomable courage. Long before the U.S. joined the war after Pearl Harbor, she volunteered
to drive ambulances for the French army on the front line during the bloody Nazi invasion of May 1940,
persevering in picking up the wounded even when fighter planes swept over to pepper the roads with
machine gun fire. Yet this was merely an apprenticeship.
    When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer
[25] her services to the British war effort. On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by
an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of
exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. He put her in touch with a
“friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by
Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and
[30] sabotage.
    SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically
barred from sending them into enemy territory. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate
a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of
undercover warfare. The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy”, “fanatical enthusiasm”
[35] and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-
50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. When Hall once again volunteered,
her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. She was one of the first SOE officers to be
dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the
war, “amazingly successful”.
[40]    Even then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the
Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing
useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. She also
masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. For a whole year, she was
SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service
[45] decided to dispatch more women into the field. This “gallant lady”, her SOE commanders concluded, was
almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat.
    When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of
her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. Even the notion of dispatching
a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. So,
[50] she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older – but inexperienced – male
officer. She soon branched out on her own, leaving him flailing in her absence. Once shot of him, Hall quickly
emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France by arming, organizing
and sometimes commanding Resistance units when blowing up bridges and attacking German convoys.
Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished
[55] Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism”. CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80
years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation
Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11.
    The extreme exigencies of war had finally given Hall the chance to show what she could do;
the return of peace saw the return of the old barriers. Internal personnel papers and the recollections
[60] of fellow agents reveal how she was undermined, sidelined and belittled by some of her superiors at
the CIA – with her supporters saddened by her “reduced status” and angered by the fact that her track
record was viewed as an “embarrassment” by the agency’s “noncombat types”. Hall never received the
recognition she deserved during her lifetime, but since then her formidable legacy has gradually become
better understood. And as Gina Haspel made clear, her formidable legacy lives on. 

Disponível em: https://time.com/5566062/virginia-hall/. Acesso em: 17 fev. 2022. (Parcial e adaptado.)

Instrução: A questão refere-se ao texto abaixo.

Virginia Hall

by Sonia Purnell

    When Gina Haspel became the first female director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
2018, she talked of how she had stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim”.
She was “deeply indebted”, she said, to women who had served the agency and its wartime predecessor
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for making her appointment possible by challenging stereotypes
[5] and breaking down barriers. Perhaps no woman is a better illustration of that history than Virginia Hall, a
one-legged socialite from Baltimore, USA, whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most
successful American female spy of the Second World War.
    Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land
the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA. It has only been comparatively recently that the
[10] agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a
citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. The agency has also now named a training building
after her. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered
from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.
    Born to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the
[15] age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. Despite her raft
of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been
repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women as well as the disabled.
    So, as war loomed in 1939, she resigned in disgust from her clerk role at the American legation
in the Baltic state of Estonia to embark on what would become a Homeric tale of adventure, action and
[20] seemingly unfathomable courage. Long before the U.S. joined the war after Pearl Harbor, she volunteered
to drive ambulances for the French army on the front line during the bloody Nazi invasion of May 1940,
persevering in picking up the wounded even when fighter planes swept over to pepper the roads with
machine gun fire. Yet this was merely an apprenticeship.
    When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer
[25] her services to the British war effort. On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by
an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of
exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. He put her in touch with a
“friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by
Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and
[30] sabotage.
    SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically
barred from sending them into enemy territory. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate
a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of
undercover warfare. The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy”, “fanatical enthusiasm”
[35] and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-
50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. When Hall once again volunteered,
her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. She was one of the first SOE officers to be
dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the
war, “amazingly successful”.
[40]    Even then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the
Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing
useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. She also
masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. For a whole year, she was
SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service
[45] decided to dispatch more women into the field. This “gallant lady”, her SOE commanders concluded, was
almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat.
    When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of
her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. Even the notion of dispatching
a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. So,
[50] she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older – but inexperienced – male
officer. She soon branched out on her own, leaving him flailing in her absence. Once shot of him, Hall quickly
emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France by arming, organizing
and sometimes commanding Resistance units when blowing up bridges and attacking German convoys.
Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished
[55] Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism”. CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80
years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation
Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11.
    The extreme exigencies of war had finally given Hall the chance to show what she could do;
the return of peace saw the return of the old barriers. Internal personnel papers and the recollections
[60] of fellow agents reveal how she was undermined, sidelined and belittled by some of her superiors at
the CIA – with her supporters saddened by her “reduced status” and angered by the fact that her track
record was viewed as an “embarrassment” by the agency’s “noncombat types”. Hall never received the
recognition she deserved during her lifetime, but since then her formidable legacy has gradually become
better understood. And as Gina Haspel made clear, her formidable legacy lives on. 

Disponível em: https://time.com/5566062/virginia-hall/. Acesso em: 17 fev. 2022. (Parcial e adaptado.)

Instrução: A questão refere-se ao texto abaixo.

Virginia Hall

by Sonia Purnell

    When Gina Haspel became the first female director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
2018, she talked of how she had stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim”.
She was “deeply indebted”, she said, to women who had served the agency and its wartime predecessor
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for making her appointment possible by challenging stereotypes
[5] and breaking down barriers. Perhaps no woman is a better illustration of that history than Virginia Hall, a
one-legged socialite from Baltimore, USA, whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most
successful American female spy of the Second World War.
    Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land
the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA. It has only been comparatively recently that the
[10] agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a
citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. The agency has also now named a training building
after her. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered
from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.
    Born to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the
[15] age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. Despite her raft
of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been
repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women as well as the disabled.
    So, as war loomed in 1939, she resigned in disgust from her clerk role at the American legation
in the Baltic state of Estonia to embark on what would become a Homeric tale of adventure, action and
[20] seemingly unfathomable courage. Long before the U.S. joined the war after Pearl Harbor, she volunteered
to drive ambulances for the French army on the front line during the bloody Nazi invasion of May 1940,
persevering in picking up the wounded even when fighter planes swept over to pepper the roads with
machine gun fire. Yet this was merely an apprenticeship.
    When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer
[25] her services to the British war effort. On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by
an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of
exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. He put her in touch with a
“friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by
Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and
[30] sabotage.
    SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically
barred from sending them into enemy territory. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate
a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of
undercover warfare. The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy”, “fanatical enthusiasm”
[35] and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-
50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. When Hall once again volunteered,
her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. She was one of the first SOE officers to be
dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the
war, “amazingly successful”.
[40]    Even then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the
Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing
useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. She also
masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. For a whole year, she was
SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service
[45] decided to dispatch more women into the field. This “gallant lady”, her SOE commanders concluded, was
almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat.
    When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of
her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. Even the notion of dispatching
a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. So,
[50] she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older – but inexperienced – male
officer. She soon branched out on her own, leaving him flailing in her absence. Once shot of him, Hall quickly
emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France by arming, organizing
and sometimes commanding Resistance units when blowing up bridges and attacking German convoys.
Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished
[55] Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism”. CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80
years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation
Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11.
    The extreme exigencies of war had finally given Hall the chance to show what she could do;
the return of peace saw the return of the old barriers. Internal personnel papers and the recollections
[60] of fellow agents reveal how she was undermined, sidelined and belittled by some of her superiors at
the CIA – with her supporters saddened by her “reduced status” and angered by the fact that her track
record was viewed as an “embarrassment” by the agency’s “noncombat types”. Hall never received the
recognition she deserved during her lifetime, but since then her formidable legacy has gradually become
better understood. And as Gina Haspel made clear, her formidable legacy lives on. 

Disponível em: https://time.com/5566062/virginia-hall/. Acesso em: 17 fev. 2022. (Parcial e adaptado.)

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    For most people shopping in America, it’s unavoidable: fast fashion is all over the place. Though definitions may vary, this large chunk of the clothing available today includes items made and shipped as cheaply and quickly as possible. And though fast fashion puts all the latest runway trends in shopper’s baskets right away, the speed and trendiness come with environmental and ethical consequences.

    Some of the most dominant textiles used in fast fashion are cotton and synthetics like polyester. Cotton farming, which is water-intensive, requires pesticides and fertilizers, which runoff into rivers and lakes to create toxic conditions for wildlife. Meanwhile, polyester — which, according to Greenpeace, is in about 60 percent of clothing made today — comes from the fossil fuel petroleum. Not only does the crude oil have to be extracted and refined, but the polyester fibers are slow to break down in landfills and are partially responsible for the microplastics washing out into bodies of water. Recently, microplastics showed up in 70 of 71 of sea water samples researchers pulled from the Arctic. Of the plastics found, over 67 percent was polyester fiber.

    Despite the pollutants going into fast fashion, the products only make brief appearances in our closets. The average American gets rid of 80 pounds of clothing each year, a figure that has grown in the last decade and a half. And though some estimate up to 95 percent of wasted clothing could be recycled, over 65 percent of what Americans toss winds up in landfills.

(Leslie Nemo. www.discovermagazine.com, 25.06.2021. Adaptado.)

INSTRUCTION: Read the text to answer question.

Train Your Brain: Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety, Depression, ADD and PTSD

Daniel Goleman

Meditation also appears to protect your brain from the negative effects of multitasking. Several studies have shown that multitasking impairs your ability to learn. “The brain actually does not do multitasking,” said Goleman. “It doesn’t do several things at once in parallel, rather it works in serial and it switches very rapidly from one thing to the next.” Once you switch away from a task that you’ve been focusing on, it takes time for you to ramp up your concentration again to where it was previously. “Unless,” says Goleman, “you’ve done that ten minutes of mindfulness; focused on your breath, for example, just watched it in and out, noticed when your mind wandered, brought it back.” In this case, your concentration returns much more quickly.

In addition to protecting your brain against the deleterious effects of multitasking and stress, mindfulness also bolsters your working memory. Not only does meditation promote growth in the hippocampus, it also trains your brain to better manage something called proactive interference. Proactive interference occurs when older memories in the brain interfere with the retrieval of newer and more task-relevant memories, an effect that some researchers theorize accounts for nearly all instances of forgetting items in your working memory. One study attributed this improved ability to handle proactive interference to mindfulness meditation’s focus on the present moment — being more present enabled study participants to prioritize recent, task-relevant memories and remember information better.

Available at:https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/meditationlearning/. Accessed on: Feb 28, 2022.