Questões de Inglês do ENEM

INSTRUCTION: Read the following text to answer the question.

Neuroplasticity: How the brain changes with learning

You cannot learn something without storing it in some form of memory for future use. From neuroscience, we know that memories are encoded by physical changes in the brain. In other words, your brain changes physically whenever you learn anything, and your brain continues to be moulded by experience and learning throughout your life.

Executive summary

        • Your brain is never fixed but continues to change with learning and experience throughout your life.

        • Most learning in the brain involves rewiring or making and strengthening connections between neurons, the cells of your brain most crucial for learning.

        • In most regions of the brain, the only neurons you will have throughout all of your life are already present at birth. Your brain does continue to grow new neurons in at least one very small but potentially important area for learning, but this is very new research and the role of these new neurons for learning is not yet known.

        • Neuroplasticity is important for all learning – much of the neuroscience research on neuroplasticity is related to how the brain recovers from injury or damage – but some of the same principles apply to how the brain changes with learning throughout all of life.

Learning and memory and changes in the brain

Let us start with a simple logical argument, to dispel myths and show that logically, of course, your brain is changing with learning:

Learning and memory are necessarily closely linked. You cannot learn something without storing it in some form of memory for use in the future, either for recall as new knowledge or improvement in skills. From neuroscience, we know that memories are encoded by physical changes in the brain (although we still debate exactly what it is that changes and how). Your brain therefore changes physically whenever anything is learnt, and so your experiences and learning throughout all of life change and mould your brain. 

There is a common brain myth or popular perception that the brain becomes fully developed sometime in early childhood, implying that nothing further changes, and that further changes in the brain with development in childhood and adolescence are somehow biologically determined, leading to a fully developed state at adulthood.

In reality, the way your brain develops is determined both by your genetics and by your learning and experiences. Biological does not mean predetermined. Your brain is shaped by your experiences and is never fixed but continues to change along with learning across the lifespan. 

Available at: https://solportal.ibe-unesco.org/articles/neuroplasticityhow-the-brain-changes-with-learning/. Accessed on: March 1st, 2025.

INSTRUCTION: Read the following text to answer the question.

Neuroplasticity: How the brain changes with learning

You cannot learn something without storing it in some form of memory for future use. From neuroscience, we know that memories are encoded by physical changes in the brain. In other words, your brain changes physically whenever you learn anything, and your brain continues to be moulded by experience and learning throughout your life.

Executive summary

        • Your brain is never fixed but continues to change with learning and experience throughout your life.

        • Most learning in the brain involves rewiring or making and strengthening connections between neurons, the cells of your brain most crucial for learning.

        • In most regions of the brain, the only neurons you will have throughout all of your life are already present at birth. Your brain does continue to grow new neurons in at least one very small but potentially important area for learning, but this is very new research and the role of these new neurons for learning is not yet known.

        • Neuroplasticity is important for all learning – much of the neuroscience research on neuroplasticity is related to how the brain recovers from injury or damage – but some of the same principles apply to how the brain changes with learning throughout all of life.

Learning and memory and changes in the brain

Let us start with a simple logical argument, to dispel myths and show that logically, of course, your brain is changing with learning:

Learning and memory are necessarily closely linked. You cannot learn something without storing it in some form of memory for use in the future, either for recall as new knowledge or improvement in skills. From neuroscience, we know that memories are encoded by physical changes in the brain (although we still debate exactly what it is that changes and how). Your brain therefore changes physically whenever anything is learnt, and so your experiences and learning throughout all of life change and mould your brain. 

There is a common brain myth or popular perception that the brain becomes fully developed sometime in early childhood, implying that nothing further changes, and that further changes in the brain with development in childhood and adolescence are somehow biologically determined, leading to a fully developed state at adulthood.

In reality, the way your brain develops is determined both by your genetics and by your learning and experiences. Biological does not mean predetermined. Your brain is shaped by your experiences and is never fixed but continues to change along with learning across the lifespan. 

Available at: https://solportal.ibe-unesco.org/articles/neuroplasticityhow-the-brain-changes-with-learning/. Accessed on: March 1st, 2025.

Leia o texto a seguir para responder à questão.

    “It’s all we’ve been talking about since November,” says Patrick Franzen, publishing director for SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He’s referring to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot unveiled that month. In response to a prompt, ChatGPT can spin out fluent and seemingly well-informed reports, essays — and scientific manuscripts. Worried about the ethics and accuracy of such content, Franzen and managers at other journals are scrambling to protect the scholarly literature from a potential flood of manuscripts written in whole or part by computer programs.

    Some publishers have not yet formulated policies. Most of those that have avoid an outright ban on AI-generated text, but ask authors to disclose their use of the automated tools, as SPIE is likely to do. For now, editors and peer reviewers have few alternatives, as they lack enforcement tools. No software so far can consistently detect the synthetic text the majority of the time. [...]

    In some cases, the resulting text is indistinguishable from what people would write. For example, researchers who read medical journal abstracts generated by ChatGPT failed to identify one-third of them as written by machine, according to a December 2022 preprint. AI developers are expected to create even more powerful versions, including ones trained specifically on scientific literature — a prospect that has sent a shock wave through the scholarly publishing industry.

    So far, scientists report playing around with ChatGPT to explore its capabilities, and a few have listed ChatGPT as a co-author on manuscripts. Publishing experts worry such limited use could morph into a spike of manuscripts containing substantial chunks of AI-written text.

Fonte: BRAINARD, Jeffrey. As scientists explore AI-written text, journals hammer out policies. Science, v. 379, n. 6634, p. 740–741, 22 feb. 2023. Disponível em: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-explore-ai-written-text-journals-hammer-policies.

 Leia o texto a seguir para responder a questão.

        The early development of radar was driven primarily by military imperatives, and the targets that were to be detected were mainly aircraft and ships. It was no surprise that echoes were also received from terrain and from rainstorms, but the discovery, during World War II, that birds were often detectable was less expected. As the technology developed, and specially after transmission at the shorter ‘microwave’ wavelengths became commonplace, echoes from insects were also identified. In the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, radar technology was adapted rapidly to the needs of meteorologists, while ornithologists pioneered the use of defence and air-traffic control radars to study bird migration.

    Radar observations of insects, however, were relatively sparse until the early 1960’s, when radar meteorologists became rather intensely interested in a type of warm-weather echo that appeared, puzzlingly from their perspective, when there was not a cloud in sight. Perhaps spurred by the meteorologists’ observations, entomologists began their own exploitation of the technology in 1968, when a rather modest radar, built by G.W. Schaefer specifically for insect observation and operated in West Africa just south of the Sahara, proved to be very effective.

Fonte: DRAKE, V.A. and REYNOLDS, D.R. Radar Entomology: Observing Insect Flight and Mi gration. CAB Internacional, 2012.

Consider the following proposals of replacement for the expression fell by the wayside (l. 32) to be substituted.

I - became unhabitual.

II - fell into disuse.

III - was prohibited.

In the given context, which would retain the meaning of the original expression?  

Read the campaign poster published on a company’s website to answer question.

(https://www.hutsix.io. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto e examine o gráfico para responder à questão.

   When Tinder (a mobile dating app) was launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed¹ an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun.

   Soon Tinder and its rivals had transformed dating. A report found that 30% of American adults had used an online dating service, including more than half of those aged between 18 and 29. One in five couples of that age had met through such a service. Usage surged during the pandemic, as lonely locked- -down singles searched for partners. The market capitalisation of Bumble, a rival to Tinder, surged to $13 billion on its first day of trading² in February 2021. Later that year the value of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and scores of other dating services, reached nearly $50 billion.

   Today roughly 350 million people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250 million in 2018, according to a research firm. In June 2024 Tokyo’s government even said it would launch a matchmaking app of its own to pair up singles in the city. Yet lately online dating has lost its spark. The apps were downloaded 237 million times globally in 2023, down from 287 million in 2020. According to a research firm, the number of people who use them at least once a month has dwindled from 154 million in 2021 to 137 million in the second quarter of 2024.

(www.economist.com, 08.08.2024. Adaptado.)

¹ to shed: to get rid of something that is no longer wanted.

² trading: the activity of buying and selling things. 

T E X T

The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning

      The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.

        All of these factors have rendered the term “viral” nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is nothing viral?

       “Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world. Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the norm.”

      “Because the concept of virality has been so watered down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of partners and business development at Linktree, a platform that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.

        A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation between viral content and the vast majority of media that users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller, and most sharing was manual (people emailing and messaging links to each other) or via early internet aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

         Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a year, worming its way through the internet as it gained traction. When social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said. Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s content in attempts to force virality.

       Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were.

      Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.

       “The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms race among tech platforms to see which could inflate metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.

       A new class of content creators also has raised the bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to explode, things really started to change in the landscape,” Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of views per video.”

     Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a higher total amount of content online per day, especially members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media through the internet and social platforms, rather than via newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so much more content in a given sitting,” she added.

     This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching 50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1 million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.

Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/

Esse cartum utiliza recursos verbais e não verbais com o intuito de

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ picture/2023/jan/07/tom-gauld-on-the-authors-ai-assistant-cartoon. Access: 12 May 2023. 

The main idea expressed in the cartoon is: