Questões de Inglês do ENEM

When will the Amazon hit a tipping point?

    Scientists say climate change, deforestation and fires could cause the world’s largest rainforest to dry out. The big question is how soon that might happen. Seen from a monitoring tower above the treetops near Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, the rainforest canopy stretches to the horizon as an endless sea of green. It looks like a rich and healthy ecosystem, but appearances are deceiving. This rainforest — which holds 16,000 separate tree species — is slowly drying out.

    Over the past century, the average temperature in the forest has risen by 1-1.5 ºC. In some parts, the dry season has expanded during the past 50 years, from four months to almost five. Severe droughts have hit three times since 2005. That’s all driving a shift in vegetation. In 2018, a study reported that trees that do best in moist conditions, such as tropical legumes from the genus Inga, are dying. Those adapted to drier climes, such as the Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa), are thriving.

    At the same time, large parts of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, are being cut down and burnt. Tree clearing has already shrunk the forest by around 15% from its 1970s extent of more than 6 million square kilometres; in Brazil, which contains more than half the forest, more than 19% has disappeared. Last year, deforestation in Brazil spiked by around 30% to almost 10,000 km2 , the largest loss in a decade. And in August 2019, videos of wildfires in the Amazon made international headlines. The number of fires that month was the highest for any August since an extreme drought in 2010.

(www.nature.com, 25.02.2020. Adaptado.)

O cartum ilustra que o aumento de temperatura, também citado no texto,

De acordo com o cartum,

Analise o mapa para responder à questão.

Analise o mapa para responder à questão.

Analise o mapa para responder à questão.

The business of climate change

    A UN assessment published this week on the progress made in stemming the global loss of species made depressing reading. Not one of the 20 targets adopted by 196 countries in a convention on biodiversity in 2010 has been met. And the latest biennial Living Planet Report from the WWF, an environmental group, found that animal populations worldwide shrank by an average of two-thirds between 1970 and 2016. The falls were greatest in the tropics. In Latin America and the Caribbean animal populations fell by 94%, on average, during the period. It is some comfort that around the world biodiversity and climate change have become big political issues. In Australia koala bears have almost brought down a state government.

(www.economist.com, 18.09.2020.)

The business of climate change

    A UN assessment published this week on the progress made in stemming the global loss of species made depressing reading. Not one of the 20 targets adopted by 196 countries in a convention on biodiversity in 2010 has been met. And the latest biennial Living Planet Report from the WWF, an environmental group, found that animal populations worldwide shrank by an average of two-thirds between 1970 and 2016. The falls were greatest in the tropics. In Latin America and the Caribbean animal populations fell by 94%, on average, during the period. It is some comfort that around the world biodiversity and climate change have become big political issues. In Australia koala bears have almost brought down a state government.

(www.economist.com, 18.09.2020.)

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Leia a tira para responder à questão.

(https://thebrickinthesky.wordpress.com)

    Born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was the son of a prominent attorney notary and a young peasant girl. Born out of wedlock, he was raised by his father, Ser Piero, and several stepmothers. 

   His early years were spent living on his father’s family estate in Vinci. Beyond basic reading, writing and mathematical skills, da Vinci did not receive much of a formal education. Recognizing his potential as an artist, his father sent him at the age of 14 or 15 to apprentice with sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio of Florence. 

   He spent six years honing his technical skills, including metalworking, leather arts, carpentry, drawing and sculpting, and became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke by the age of 20. He remained with Verrocchio until he became an independent master in 1478. Around that time, he took on his first commissioned work, The Adoration of the Magi, for Florence’s San Donato, a Scopeto monastery, but departed for Milan the following year, leaving the painting unfinished. It has been in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1670. 

  Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of The Vitruvian Man, based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. 

  Leonardo is also revered for his technological ingenuity. In the early 1490s, he began chronicling his thoughts about painting, architecture, mechanics and human anatomy. These notebooks contained wide-ranging ideas, including plans for a “flying machine,” bicycle and drawings of a fetus in the womb and the human skeleton. 

   His interests and intellect traversed so many disciplines that he symbolized the term “Renaissance Man”. Unfortunately, these notebooks were not published and his ideas did not advance scientific understanding in the Renaissance period.

   Today, Leonardo is widely recognized as one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived.

(Adapted form: http://www.livescience.com/39355-leonardo-da-vinci.html)