50 Questões de Inglês da Fuvest Resolvidas e Comentadas

To live the longest and healthiest life possible, get smarter. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) data show that past a certain threshold, health and wealth are just weakly correlated. However, overall health is closely tied to how many years people spend in school. Mexico, for instance, has a fifth the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States, but, for women, more than 50 percent of the latter’s schooling.

In line with the trend, Mexico’s female adult mortality rate is only narrowly higher. Vietnam and Yemen have roughly equivalent per capita GDP. Yet Vietnamese women average 6.3 more years in school and are half as likely to die between the ages of 15 and 60. “Economic growth is also significantly associated with child mortality reductions, but the magnitude of the association is much smaller than that of increased education,” comments Emmanuela Gakidou, IHME’s director of education and training. “One year of schooling gives you about 10 percent lower mortality rates, whereas with a 10 percent increase in GDP, your mortality rate would go down only by 1 to 2 percent.”

Discover, May 31, 2013. Adaptado.

A wave of anger is sweeping the cities of the world.

The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything.

Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. In one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.

Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world – if at all. In 1989 the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968 did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, news is not good.

The Economist, June 29, 2013. Adaptado.

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life is Adam Phillips's 17th book and is a characteristic blend of literary criticism and philosophical reflection packaged around a central idea. The theme here is missed opportunities, roads not taken, alternative versions of our lives and ourselves, all of which, Phillips argues, exert a powerful hold over our imaginations. Using a series of examples and close readings of authors including Philip Larkin and Shakespeare, the book suggests that a broader understanding of life's inevitable disappointments and thwarted desires can enable us to live fuller, richer lives. Good things come to those who wait.

Does he see himself as a champion of frustration? “I'm not on the side of frustration exactly, so much as the idea that one has to be able to bear frustration in order for satisfaction to be realistic. I'm interested in how the culture of consumer capitalism depends on the idea that we can't bear frustration, so that every time we feel a bit restless or bored or irritable, we eat, or we shop.”

The Guardiaguardian.co.uk, 1 June 2012. Adaptado.

Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency. Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systems to many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient. “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said. “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.” The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.” The paper said such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”. Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado

As astronomers gaze into the depths of space, they do so with unease: They don’t know precisely what the universe is made of.

Surprisingly, no one knows the stars’ exact chemical composition: how many carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms they have relative to hydrogen, the most common element.

These numbers are crucial, because they affect how stars live and die, what types of planets form and even how readily life might arise on other worlds.

Twenty years ago, astronomers expressed confidence in the numbers they had been working with. Now, not so much. The problem lies not in the far corners of the cosmos, but much closer to home. Astonishingly, scientists don’t know exactly what the sun is made of. As a result, they don’t know what the other stars are made of, either.

“The sun is a fundamental yardstick,” says Martin Asplund, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. “When we determine the abundance of a certain element in a star or a galaxy or a gas cloud anywhere in the universe, we use the sun as a reference point.”

The sun’s location in the Milky Way also makes it a good representative of the entire galaxy. most stars in the universe reside in giant galaxies like the Milky Way, which makes the sun a touchstone for the entire cosmos.

For nearly a century, astronomers have judged stars normal or not by seeing whether their chemical compositions match the sun’s. Most stars near us do; some don’t.

Scientific American. 1 July 2020. Adaptado.

I knew TikTok existed, I didn’t even fully understand what it was until a few months ago. I also realized that something radical, yet largely invisible, is ­happening on the internet — with implications we still don’t understand.

When I was growing up, I took it for granted that the people who became famous enough to be listened to by a crowd had worked hard for that accolade and generally operated with the support of an institution or an established industry.

The idea that I, as a teenager in my bedroom, might suddenly communicate with 100,000 people or more, would have seemed bizarre.

Today’s kids no longer see life in these hierarchical and institutional terms. Yes, their physical worlds are often constrained by parental controls, a lack of access to the outdoors and insane over-scheduling.

But despite that (or, more accurately, in reaction to that), they see the internet as a constantly evolving frontier, where it is still possible for a bold and lucky pioneer to grab some land or find a voice. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Most voices on the internet never travel beyond a relatively small network, and much of the content that goes viral on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube or Instagram does so because of unseen institutions at work (for example, a public relations team aiming to boost a celebrity’s profile).

Fame can suddenly appear — and then just as suddenly be taken away again, because the audience gets bored, the platform’s algorithms change or the cultural trend that a breakout video has tapped into goes out of fashion.

For a teenager, social media can seem like a summer garden at dusk filled with fireflies: spots of lights suddenly flare up and then die down, moving in an unpredictable, capricious display.

Is this a bad thing? We will not know for several years.

Financial Times. 5 February 2020. Adaptado.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

Well, I wake in the morning

Fold my hands and pray for rain

I got a head full of ideas

That are drivin’ me insane

It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more

Well, he hands you a nickel

He hands you a dime

He asks you with a grin

If you’re havin’ a good time

Then he fines you every time you slam the door

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more

No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more

Well, he puts his cigar out in your face just for kicks

His bedroom window it is made out of bricks

The National Guard stands around his door

Ah, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more, alright

Bon Dylan, “Maggie’s Farm”, do álbum Bringing it all home, 1965.

Leia os provérbios:

1. Don’t count your chickens before they lay eggs.

2. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

3. Every cloud has a silver lining.

JUST 10 YEARS INTO A NEW CENTURY, MORE THAN TWO-thirds of the country sees the past decade as a period of decline for the U.S., according to a new TIME/Aspen Ideas Festival poll that probed Americans on the decade since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda seriously weakened, but the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the decisions that followed have, in the view of most Americans, put the U.S. in a tailspin that the country has been unable to shake during two administrations and almost 10 years of trying.

ACCORDING TO THE POLL, ONLY 6% OF MORE THAN 2,000 Americans believe the country has completely recovered from the events of 9/11. Some of this pessimism can be tied to fears of more terrorist attacks. Despite the death of bin Laden, most Americans think another terrorist attack in the U.S. is likely.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).

Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence obstacles like speaking and hearing. “All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based in Silicon Valley. “It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”

http://www.nytimes.com, July 11, 2011. Adaptado

Time was, advertising was a relatively simple undertaking: buy some print space and airtime, create the spots, and blast them at a captive audience. Today it’s chaos: while passive viewers still exist, mostly we pick and choose what to consume, ignoring ads with a touch of the DVR remote. Ads are forced to become more like content, and the best aim to engage consumers so much that they pass the material on to friends – by email, Twitter, Facebook – who will pass it on to friends, who will... you get the picture. In the industry, “viral” has become a usefully vague way to describe any campaign that spreads from person to person, acquiring its own momentum.

It’s not that online advertising has eclipsed TV, but it has become its full partner – and in many ways the more substantive one, a medium in which the audience must be earned, not simply bought.

Newsweek, March 26 & April 2, 2012. Adaptado.

What time is it? That simple question probably is asked more

       often today than ever. In our clock‐studded, cell‐phone society,

       the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can

       blissfully partition our days into ever smaller increments for ever

5     more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always

       know it is 7:03 P.M.

       Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make

       the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise

       knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now”

10   dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. Bound by the

       speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our

       perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant

       ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can

       never catch up.

15   Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us. Relativity

       dictates that, like a strange syrup, time flows slower on moving

       trains than in the stations and faster in the mountains than in

       the valleys. The time for our wristwatch or digital screen is not

       exactly the same as the time for our head.  

20   Our intuitions are deeply paradoxical. Time heals all

        wounds, but it is also the great destroyer. Time is relative but

        also relentless. There is time for every purpose under heaven,

        but there is never enough.  

                                                       Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds. 

Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away. 

Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.” 

There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare. 

To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York. 

Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado

Algorithms are everywhere. They play the stockmarket, decide whether you can have a mortgage and may one day drive your car for you. They search the internet when commanded, stick carefully chosen advertisements into the sites you visit and decide what prices to show you in online shops. (…) But what exactly are algorithms, and what makes them so powerful?

An algorithm is, essentially, a brainless way of doing clever things. It is a set of precise steps that need no great mental effort to follow but which, if obeyed exactly and mechanically, will lead to some desirable outcome. Long division and column addition are examples that everyone is familiar with—if you follow the procedure, you are guaranteed to get the right answer. So is the strategy, rediscovered thousands of times every year by schoolchildren bored with learning mathematical algorithms, for playing a perfect game of noughts and crosses. The brainlessness is key: each step should be as simple and as free from ambiguity as possible. Cooking recipes and driving directions are algorithms of a sort. But instructions like “stew the meat until tender” or “it’s a few miles down the road” are too vague to follow without at least some interpretation.

(…)

The Economist, August 30, 2017.

About half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting dengue, according to the World Health Organization. The mosquito is found in tropical and subtropical climates around the world; however, dengue does not naturally occur in these creatures: the mosquitoes get dengue from us. 

The mechanism of dengue infection is simple. Female mosquitoes bite humans because they need the protein found in our blood to produce eggs. (Male mosquitoes do not bite.) If the mosquito bites someone with dengue – and then, after the virus’s roughly eight to 12day replication period, bites someone else – it passes dengue into its next victim’s bloodstream. 

There is no vaccine against dengue, but infecting mosquitoes with a natural bacterium called Wolbachia blocks the insects’ ability to pass the disease to humans. The microbe spreads among both male and female mosquitoes: infected females lay eggs that harbor the bacterium, and when Wolbachiafree females mate with infected males, their eggs simply do not hatch. Researchers are now releasing Wolbachia infected females into the wild in Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil.

Scientific American, June 2015. Adaptado

Working for on-demand startups like Uber and TaskRabbit is supposed to offer flexible hours and higher wages, but many workers have found the pay lower and the hours less flexible than they expected. Even more surprising: 8 percent of those chauffeuring passengers and 16 percent of those making deliveries said they lack personal auto insurance.

Those are among the findings from a survey about the work life of independent contractors for ondemand startups, a booming sector of the tech industry, being released Wednesday.

“We want to shed light on the industry as a whole,” said Isaac Madan, a Stanford master’s candidate in bioinformatics who worked with two other Stanford students and a recent alumnus on the survey of 1,330 workers. “People need to understand how this space will change and evolve and help the economy.”

On-demand, often called the sharing economy, refers to companies that let users summon workers via smartphone apps to handle all manner of services: rides, cleaning, chores, deliveries, car parking, waiting in lines. Almost uniformly, those workers are independent contractors rather than salaried employees.

That status is the main point of contention in a recent rash of lawsuits in which workers are filing for employee status. While the survey did not directly ask contractors if they would prefer to be employees, it found that their top workplace desires were to have paid health insurance, retirement benefits and paid time off for holidays, vacation and sick days – all perks of full time workers. Respondents also expressed interest in having more chances for advancement, education sponsorship, disability insurance and human relations support. 

Because respondents were recruited rather than randomly selected, the survey does not claim to be representational but a conclusion one may come to is that flexibility of new jobs comes with a cost. Not all workers are prepared for that!

SFChronicle.com and SFGate.com, May 20, 2015. Adaptado.

You know the exit is somewhere along this stretch of highway, but you have never taken it before and do not want to miss it. As you carefully scan the side of the road for the exit sign, numerous distractions intrude on your visual field: billboards, a snazzy convertible, a cell phone buzzing on the dashboard. How does your brain focus on the task at hand? To answer this question, neuroscientists generally study the way the brain strengthens its response to what you are looking for – jolting itself with an especially large electrical pulse when you see it. Another mental trick may be just as important, according to a study published in April in the Journal of Neuroscience: the brain deliberately weakens its reaction to everything else so that the target seems more important in comparison. Such research may eventually help scientists understand what is happening in the brains of people with attention problems, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. And in a world increasingly permeated by distractions – a major contributor to traffic accidents – any insights into how the brain pays attention should get ours.

Between now and 2050 the number of people living in cities will grow from 3.9 billion to 6.3 billion. The proportion of urban dwellers will swell from 54% to 67% of the world's population, according to the UN. In other words, for the next 36 years the world's cities will expand by the equivalent of sic São Paulos every year. This growth will largely occur in developing countries. But most governments there are ignoring the problem, says William Cobbett of the Cities Alliance, on NGO that supports initiatives such as the one launched by New York University to help cities make long-term preparations for their growth. "Whether we want it or not, urbanisation is inevitable," say specialists. "The real question is: how can we improve its quality?"

The Economist, June 21st 2014. Adaptado.