Questões de Inglês do ENEM

 Instrução: Leia o texto para responder às questões de números 31 a 39.

               Brazil: the natural knowledge economy
Kirsten Bound – THE ATLAS OF IDEAS

    If you grew up in Europe or North America you will no doubt have been taught in school that the Wright Brothers from Ohio invented and flew the first aeroplane – the Kitty Hawk – in 1903. But if you grew up in Brazil you will have been taught that the real inventor was in fact a Brazilian from Minas Gerais called
Alberto Santos Dumont, whose 14-bis aeroplane took to the skies in 1906. This fierce historical debate, which turns on definitions of ‘practical airplanes’, the ability to launch unaided, length of time spent in the air and the credibility of witnesses, will not be resolved here. Yet it is a striking example of the lack of global recognition for Brazil’s achievements in innovation.
    Almost a century later, in 2005, Santos Dumont’s intellectual heirs, the company Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica (EMBRAER), made aviation history of a different kind when they unveiled the Ipanema, the world’s first commercially produced aircraft to run solely on biofuels. This time, the world
was watching. Scientific American credited it as one of the most important inventions of the year. The attention paid to the Ipanema reflects the growing interest in biofuels as a potential solution to climate change and rising energy demand. To their advocates, biofuels – most commonly bioethanol or biodiesel – offer a more secure, sustainable energy supply that can reduce carbon emissions by 50–60 per cent compared to fossil fuels.
      From learning to fly to learning to cope with the environmental costs of flight, biofuel innovations like the Ipanema reflect some of the tensions of modern science, in which expanding the frontiers of human ingenuity goes hand in hand with managing the consequences. The recent backlash against biofuels, which has seen them blamed for global food shortages as land is reportedly diverted from food crops, points to a growing interdependence between the science and innovation systems of different countries, and between innovation, economics and environmental sustainability.
    The debates now raging over biofuels reflect some of the wider dynamics in Brazil’s innovation system. They remind us that Brazil’s current strengths and achievements have deeper historical roots than is sometimes imagined. They reflect the fact that Brazil’s natural resources and assets are a key area of opportunity for science and innovation – a focus that leads us to characterise Brazil as a ‘natural knowledge economy’. Most importantly, they highlight the propitious timing of Brazil’s growing strength in these areas at a time when climate change, the environment, food scarcity and rising worldwide energy demand are at the forefront of global consciousness. What changed between the maiden flight of the 14-bis and the maiden flight of the Ipanema is not just Brazil’s capacity for technological and scientific innovation, but the rest of the world’s appreciation of the potential of that innovation to address some of the pressing challenges that confront us all.

By Peter Kornbluh

“For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country’s leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Puncto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy’s code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month. ‘Doonie’, as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press – a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile’s renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago’s leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile – and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende’s election.

The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee’s words, as ‘the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda.’ But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of Clinton administration, the history of the ‘El Mercurio Project’ emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents:

• Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the ‘timing for possible military action’ to prevent Allende from taking office. • President Nixon directly authorized massive funding in the newspaper. The White House approve close to $2 million dollars – a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.

• Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the ‘most militant parts of the opposition’ pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.

• In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet’s brutal repression.”

From: KORNBLUH, Peter. “The El Mercurio File”. Columbia Journalism Review. New York, p.14-15, September/October 2007.

In the letter, Jeff Owens uses an informal manner to open and close his message. The most appropriated level of language in formal style to write the opening Dear Phil (line 1) and the closing Your Cordially (line 12) would be:

In the sentence, ‘Rice will not grow well unless there is abundant rainfall’ (lines 3-5). The conjunction unless would be appropriated replaced by:

The Agriculture Consultant, Jeff Owens reports to Phil some suggestions about planting rice. These suggestions are based in weather specialists who forecast a dry caused by the increasing of Earth’s temperature. Based on this statement and in the text II, consider the solutions pointed by Jeff Owens to reduce plant rice problems of Phil.

TEXT D

PARAGRAPH 1: The payment of fees by students is widely seen as a novelty. In fact this ‘innovation’ marks a return to the medieval origins of universities. At that time student money meant student power on a huge scale. Medieval student power was focused on the University of Bologna. […] This power was based on their economic grip over their teachers.[…] Most university lecturers depended for their academic incomes on teaching fees collected from their students. […] The power which students derived from paying fees at Bologna led to extensive control over the lecturing system. […]

PARAGRAPH 2: For what was a lecturer punished? He was fined if he started the lectures a minute late or if he went beyond the approved time. […] The lecturer was also fined if he failed to cover the syllabus according to an agreed timetable. […]

PARAGRAPH 3: All students were encouraged to denounce lecturers who were absent without leave or who contravened the statutes in any other way. In addition, there was also an organized system of secret denunciations. Four students were elected in secret to spy on the lecturers. […]

PARAGRAPH 4: Student power at Bologna lasted a little over one hundred years […] As __ its rise, its demise is linked directly __ the subject __ student fees. By 1350 almost all the lecturers were appointed and paid __ the local commune. With changes in the payment of lecturers, control of the university passed __ the students to the commune and there it would remain.

PARAGRAPH 5: What does the situation in medieval Bologna have to say to us? Hopefully the return of student fees will not be accompanied by the return of student spies, secret denunciations and fines on lecturers. But, as ever greater emphasis is placed on research, the Bolognese case may be a timely reminder of the demands of students and of the importance of high quality teaching.

According to TEXT D, payment of fees allowed the students to:

The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own-thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued. East Asian societies exalt the larger society; behavior is constrained by social roles, conformity is prized, outsiders shunned. […] But the reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes. Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation. […]

    How might pathogen-fighting customs and attitudes arise, or fail to? Maybe people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity. Or maybe there are genes for behaviors that, at the level of a whole society, manifest themselves as collectivism or individualism, and genes for individualism get wiped out in diseaseplagued regions. But when East Asians move to the West or Westerners go East, […] they begin to see, think and behave like people in their adopted society. That would be hard to do if they were in the grip of collectivist or individualistic genes. The presence of pathogens also predicts cross-cultural differences in personality traits, not just shared cultural values. […] The physical world has shaped skin color and other superficial features. The next frontier is fathoming how it might have shaped our very thoughts and values. 

Sharon Begley, Newsweek, April 14th, 2008

According to TEXT C the difference between the East and West is due to:

The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own-thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued. East Asian societies exalt the larger society; behavior is constrained by social roles, conformity is prized, outsiders shunned. […] But the reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes. Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation. […]

    How might pathogen-fighting customs and attitudes arise, or fail to? Maybe people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity. Or maybe there are genes for behaviors that, at the level of a whole society, manifest themselves as collectivism or individualism, and genes for individualism get wiped out in diseaseplagued regions. But when East Asians move to the West or Westerners go East, […] they begin to see, think and behave like people in their adopted society. That would be hard to do if they were in the grip of collectivist or individualistic genes. The presence of pathogens also predicts cross-cultural differences in personality traits, not just shared cultural values. […] The physical world has shaped skin color and other superficial features. The next frontier is fathoming how it might have shaped our very thoughts and values. 

Sharon Begley, Newsweek, April 14th, 2008

The function of TEXT C is to

Earth on its way to the ICU

    There’s no way to deny it anymore. It has been proven through a report from the UN (United Nations) that, yes, it was man who made the Earth sick. And even if now the world, diagnosed, decides to reduce the damage that our presence here causes (which is not very likely) and decides to promote an extreme change in the economical structures, the Earth, still at that, will have its fever raised in 1.1◦C this century. Is that bad? But it is still bearable. Now if nothing is done, the world must prepare for a new class of refugees: the climatic. A heating of up to 6◦C would be forecasted. To have an idea, the Earth was only 5◦C colder in the Ice Age, which put an end to the Dinosaur Age. If the “dinos” couldn’t handle the shock, who’d think the humans would. Humans?

     It is most probable, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes, that the Earth will be warmed 3◦C, which will cause phenomena such as thawing, hurricanes, droughts and tempests. The sea level, according to the report, may rise between 18 and 59 centimeters, making cities below sea level disappear.

     In Brazil, the greatest impact would be on the Northeast, which could become a semi-desert. The Amazon would suffer due to lack of rain, affecting the entire rainforest, losing biodiversity. On the other hand, the intensity of the rain would impact the South-east. To the UN, The world must do the impossible to stagnate the intensity of the fever, so that the temperature increase does not exceed 2◦C. The warning has been given.

Autora: Sonia Racy

Artigo extraído da Revista, TAM magazine, Ano 4, Número 37, Março 2007. 

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