Questões de Inglês do ENEM

Über-Adaptable Airless Tires

By Lisa Eadicicco

In the future, our cars will be smart, and our tires will be smarter. For starters, it’s airless, eliminating the need to worry about pounds per square inch. It’s also made from recycled materials in an effort to reduce waste. But the most impressive feature may be its 3-D--printed treads, which can be swapped in and out to accommodate various road conditions—without changing the tire itself. The challenge will be figuring out a way to do it quickly, says Terry Gettys, who helped lead the project, “because consumers are going to want their tires [ready to go] in just a few minutes.”

Brazil’s presidential biopic
Lula, sanitised
SÃO PAULO

A film for the campaign trail

    ONCE upon a time it was considered indecent to turn living people into myths, or even into films, with too much haste. The cycle seems to be shorter now. Gandhi had to wait until 34 years after his death before he appeared on cinema screens around the world. George Bush junior, by contrast, was the victim of an Oliver Stone biopic during the last year of his presidency. Now a Brazilian director, Fábio Barreto, has done the same for Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as he starts his final year of office.

    “Lula, Son of Brazil” is the tale of a poor boy made good, his flaws left on the cutting table and his virtues in close-up. Since Lula hopes to secure the election of his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, in October, it is controversial. The film “promotes the worship of a political myth,” said Eugênio Bucci, a critic and journalism professor. Before it was even released Veja, a magazine, pointed out that many of the companies that funded its production (the most expensive in the history of Brazilian cinema) have either won or hope to win contracts from the government.
    For all that, the film is very watchable. It opens in the poor north-east, where Lula was born into a landscape of bright red soil and cacti, and ends with his rise as a metalworkers’ union leader in the industrial belt of São Paulo in the 1970s. This is a candyfloss version of the story, however. Lula’s reverses are shown: the little finger lost to a lathe, the death of his first wife and child in childbirth. But he is too good to be true: a perfect student, perfect husband and political moderate who abhorred violence.
    The book on which the film is based, by contrast, quotes Lula as approving of an incident in which a director of a factory that is on strike is thrown out of a window. In the film he runs from the factory appalled. That is a shame. A more nuanced telling would not detract from Lula’s remarkable life story and achievement.
    The film is doing well at the box office. Its producers say it is running more strongly in the north-east than in the populous south-east, which means it mirrors Ms Rousseff’s fortunes in the polls. There are plans to show the film on mobile screens in places with no cinema. It may get an airing on television, though there is no such deal in place yet.
    All this helps a process of mythmaking around Lula that is already well under way. Catching some of Lula’s stardust is Ms Rousseff’s best hope for capturing the presidency in October, and there are some signs that this is happening. The gap between her and José Serra, her main rival, halved between March and December last year and now stands at 14 points. Competing against a celluloid legend is not easy.

www.economist.com

The Boom Is Nigh
Why the coming recovery will hurt like hell.

By Gregg Easterbrook

    Home prices keep falling, but productivity is rising fast. GDP grew 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter, yet unemployment remains stubbornly high. Inflation is nonexistent, while the consumer confidence index just rose to 55.9 from 53.6—whatever that means. Can’t make sense of these economic indicators? Don’t worry, because nobody else can, either.
    Here is what you really need to know: a Sonic Boom is coming. It will be caused by globalization. And while globalization may be driving you crazy, it’s just getting started. Thirty years ago, Shenzhen, China, did not exist; today, it has nearly 9 million residents, roughly the same as New York City. In a single generation, it has grown from a village of tarpaper shacks into an important urban center. It has become the world’s fourth-busiest port, busier than Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. Never before has a great city been built so fast, nor a productive economy established from so little.
    The international recession that began in 2008 has made the Sonic Boom quieter, but history shows that when a crisis ends, the larger trends in place before the crisis usually resume. Shenzhen represents the larger trend of growth, change, and transformation at unprecedented velocity. Thanks to vast increases in productivity, worldwide economic growth soon will pick up, creating rising prosperity and higher living standards for most people in most nations. The world will be far more interconnected, leading to better and more affordable products, as well as ever better communication among nations.
    But there’s a big catch: just as favorable economic and social trends are likely to resume, many problems that have characterized recent decades are likely to get worse, too. Job instability, economic insecurity, a sense of turmoil, the fear that even when things seem good a hammer is about to fall—these are also part of the larger trend. As world economies become ever more linked by computers, job stress will become a 24/7 affair. Frequent shakeups in industries will cause increasing uncertainty. The horizon has never been brighter, but we may not feel particularly happy about it.

www.newsweek.com

The Boom Is Nigh
Why the coming recovery will hurt like hell.

By Gregg Easterbrook

    Home prices keep falling, but productivity is rising fast. GDP grew 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter, yet unemployment remains stubbornly high. Inflation is nonexistent, while the consumer confidence index just rose to 55.9 from 53.6—whatever that means. Can’t make sense of these economic indicators? Don’t worry, because nobody else can, either.
    Here is what you really need to know: a Sonic Boom is coming. It will be caused by globalization. And while globalization may be driving you crazy, it’s just getting started. Thirty years ago, Shenzhen, China, did not exist; today, it has nearly 9 million residents, roughly the same as New York City. In a single generation, it has grown from a village of tarpaper shacks into an important urban center. It has become the world’s fourth-busiest port, busier than Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. Never before has a great city been built so fast, nor a productive economy established from so little.
    The international recession that began in 2008 has made the Sonic Boom quieter, but history shows that when a crisis ends, the larger trends in place before the crisis usually resume. Shenzhen represents the larger trend of growth, change, and transformation at unprecedented velocity. Thanks to vast increases in productivity, worldwide economic growth soon will pick up, creating rising prosperity and higher living standards for most people in most nations. The world will be far more interconnected, leading to better and more affordable products, as well as ever better communication among nations.
    But there’s a big catch: just as favorable economic and social trends are likely to resume, many problems that have characterized recent decades are likely to get worse, too. Job instability, economic insecurity, a sense of turmoil, the fear that even when things seem good a hammer is about to fall—these are also part of the larger trend. As world economies become ever more linked by computers, job stress will become a 24/7 affair. Frequent shakeups in industries will cause increasing uncertainty. The horizon has never been brighter, but we may not feel particularly happy about it.

www.newsweek.com

Illustration by David Simond