FUVEST 2015

Questão 3101

(FUVEST - 2015)

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 attentionͲdeficit/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.

Scientific American, July 2014. Adaptado.

De acordo com o texto, a pesquisa mencionada pode

Questão 3108

(UNICAMP - 2015 - 1ª FASE)

O cartaz acima critica, de forma irônica, 

Questão 3118

(FUVEST 2015 — 2ª Fase - 2º dia)

Redigindo em português, atenda ao que se pede.

a) Com base no texto, compare a situação da floresta amazônica em 1998 com a de 2014.

b) Segundo o texto, o que é o projeto ARPA e qual a importância que ele pode vir a ter para a floresta amazônica?

Questão 3186

(UNESP - 2015 - 1 FASE )

No contexto do quadrinho, o termo “can” indica uma ideia de:

Questão 3261

(UNESP - 2015/2 - 1ª FASE)

Oxfam study finds richest 1% is likely to control half of global wealth by 2016

By Patricia Cohen
January 19, 2015

The world's business elite will meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Credit Jean-Christophe Bott/European Pressphoto Agency

The richest 1 percent is likely to control more than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday. The warning about deepening global inequality comes just as the world’s business elite prepare to meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own 1.9 trillion dollars, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 percent of the population controls nearly half of the world’s total wealth, a share that is also increasing.

The type of inequality that currently characterizes the world’s economies is unlike anything seen in recent years, the report explained. “Between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current U.S. dollars had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires,” it said. “However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”

Winnie Byanyima, the charity’s executive director, noted in a statement that more than a billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day. “Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Ms. Byanyima said. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering.”

Investors with interests in finance, insurance and health saw the biggest windfalls, Oxfam said. Using data from Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, it said those listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and health care industries saw their net worth jump by 47 percent. The charity credited those individuals’ rapidly growing fortunes in part to multimilliondollar lobbying campaigns to protect and enhance their interests. 

(www.nytimes.com. Adaptado.)

No trecho do terceiro parágrafo “However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”, o termo “however” pode ser substituído, sem alteração de sentido, por: 

Questão 3294

(FGV - 2015)

Argentina defaults – Eighth time unlucky

Cristina Fernández argues that her country’s latest default is different. She is missing the point.

Aug 2^nd 2014

ARGENTINA’S first bond, issued in 1824, was supposed to have had a lifespan of 46 years. Less than four years later, the government defaulted. Resolving the ensuing stand-off with creditors took 29 years. Since then seven more defaults have followed, the most recent this week, when Argentina failed to make a payment on bonds issued as partial compensation to victims of the previous default, in 2001.

Most investors think they can see a pattern in all this, but Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, insists the latest default is not like the others. Her government, she points out, had transferred the full $539m it owed to the banks that administer the bonds. It is America’s courts (the bonds were issued under American law) that blocked the payment, at the behest of the tiny minority of owners of bonds from 2001 who did not accept the restructuring Argentina offered them in 2005 and again in 2010. These “hold-outs”, balking at the 65% haircut the restructuring entailed, not only persuaded a judge that they should be paid in full but also got him to ¹freeze payments on the restructured bonds until Argentina coughs up.

Argentina claims that paying the hold-outs was impossible. It is not just that they are “vultures” as Argentine officials often put it, who bought the bonds for cents on the dollar after the previous default and are now holding those who accepted the restructuring (accounting for 93% of the debt) to ransom. The main problem is that a clause in the restructured bonds prohibits Argentina from offering the hold-outs better terms without paying everyone else the same. Since it cannot afford to do that, it says it had no choice but to default.

Yet it is not certain that the clause requiring equal treatment of all bondholders would have applied, given that Argentina would not have been paying the hold-outs voluntarily, but on the courts’ orders. Moreover, some owners of the restructured bonds had agreed to waive their rights; ²had Argentina made a concerted effort to persuade the remainder to do the same, it might have succeeded. Lawyers and bankers have suggested various ways around the clause in question, which expires at the end of the year. But Argentina’s government was slow to consider these options or negotiate with the hold-outs, hiding instead behind indignant nationalism.

Ms Fernández is right that the consequences of America’s court rulings have been perverse, unleashing a big financial dispute in an attempt to solve a relatively small one. But ³hers is not the first government to be hit with an awkward verdict. Instead of railing against it, she should have tried to minimize the harm it did. Defaulting has helped no one: none of the bondholders will now be paid, Argentina looks like a pariah again, and its economy will remain starved of loans and investment.

Happily, much of the damage can still be undone. It is not too late to strike a deal with the hold-outs or back an ostensibly private effort to buy out their claims. A quick fix would make it easier for Argentina to borrow again internationally. That, in turn, would speed development of big oil and gas deposits, the income from which could help ease its money troubles.

More important, it would help to change ⁴perceptions of Argentina as a financial rogue state. Over the past year or so Ms Fernández seems to have been trying to rehabilitate Argentina’s image and resuscitate its faltering economy. She settled financial disputes with government creditors and with Repsol, a Spanish oil firm whose Argentine assets she had expropriated in 2012. This week’s events have overshadowed all that. For its own sake, and everyone else’s, ⁵Argentina should hold its nose and do a deal with the hold-outs.

(http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21610263. Adapted) 

The excerpt from the reference 2 – had Argentina made a concerted effort to persuade the remainder to do the same, it might have succeeded. – denotes an idea of

Questão 3373

(UEMG - 2015)

Virtual people, real friends

by Anna Pickard (The Guardian)

The benefits of forming friendships with those we meet online are obvious, so why is the idea still treated with such disdain?

Another week, another survey claiming to reveal great truths about ourselves. This one says that people are increasingly turning “online friends” into people they’d think worthy of calling real-life friends. Well, that’s stating the obvious, I would have thought! If there’s a more perfect place for making friends, I have yet to find it. However, when surveys like this are reported in the media, it’s always with a slight air of “it’s a crazy, crazy world!” And whenever the subject crops up in the conversation, it’s clear that people look down on friends like these. In fact some members of my family still refer to my partner of six years as my “Internet Boyfriend.”

It’s the shocked reaction that surprises me as if people on the internet were not “real” at all. Certainly, people play a character online quite often – they may be a more confident or more argumentative version of their real selves – but what’s the alternative? Is meeting people at work so much better than making friends in a virtual world? Perhaps, but for some a professional distance between their “work” selves and their “social” selves is necessary, especially, if they tend to let their guard down and might say or do something they will later regret.

Those people disapproving of online friendships argue that the concept of “friendship” is used loosely in a world driven by technology, in which you might have a thousand online friends. They make a distinction between “social connections” – ¹acquaintances who are only one click away – and meaningful human interaction, which they say requires time and effort. They note that for many Facebook “friends,” conversation is a way of exchanging information quickly and efficiently rather than being a social activity.

However, I’ve found that far from being the home of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of like-minded people. For the first time in history, we’re lucky to enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but by those who have similar interests and senses of humour, or passionate feelings about the same things. The friends I’ve made online might be spread wide geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by millions miles. They are the best friends I have.

Obviously, there will be concerns about the dangers of online friendship. There are always stories buzzing around such as “man runs off with the woman he met on Second Life” or people who meet their “soulmate” online and are never seen again. But people are people, whether online or not. As for “real” friendship dying out, surely, is social networking simply redefining our notion of what this is in the twenty-first century? The figures – half a billion Facebook users worldwide – speak for themselves. And technology has allowed countless numbers of these people to keep in close contact with their loved ones, however far away they are. Without it, many disabled or household people might go without social contact at all. Call me naive, call me a social misfit, I don’t care. Virtual people make best real friends.

Adapted from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/internet-relationships

Read the passage below to complete the gaps with the relative pronouns (1 - 4):

Online friends are people _______ always post messages and pictures of the places _______ they are, _______ they are with and ______ they are doing.

1.what

2. who

3.whom

4. where

The CORRECT sequence is:

Questão 3374

(IMED - 2015)

Mark Twain (1835-1910), ¹____ real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was the first writer of importance born west of the Mississipi River. His novels, short stories, essays, and lectures vividly portray the life of the American era in which he lived. Probably the most striking element of his writings is its ²down-to-earth, honest humor.

(Source: Lado,R. (1973). English Series, vol. 6. Regents Publishers, New York, p.268)

O pronome relativo que preenche corretamente a lacuna na referência 1 é:

Questão 3490

(Acafe - 2015)

TEXTO PARA A PRÓXIMA QUESTÃO:

Brazil cotton deal perpetuates an unhealthy status quo of subsidies

When is a victory for the United States not a victory for the American taxpayer? When it’s an international agreement like the one the Obama administration has just reached to settle a long-running dispute with Brazil over cotton subsidies. The roots of that dispute 1lie in this country’s history of showering federal funds on crop producers, including cotton growers. That particular business received from Washington between 1995 and 2012, according to the Environmental Working Group, largely through programs that had the effect of rewarding farmers for increasing production. The extra supply dampened prices on the world market, so, in 2002, Brazil complained to the World Trade Organization, which ruled that US cotton subsidies were indeed “trade-distorting” and authorized Brazil to retaliate against US exports. The United States avoided sanctions — not by reforming its programs but by agreeing in 2010 to pay Brazil’s cotton farmers per year.

In short, the US government bought off Brazil’s cotton farmers so that it could 2keep on buying off its own. Under the new settlement, announced Wednesday, Brazil agreed to drop its case at the WTO and to 3forgo any new ones during the five-year term of the farm bill Congress enacted last year. In return, the United States agreed to trim the modest US cotton export credit subsidy program and, most important, to pay Brazil one last dollop of taxpayer cash, in the amount of

This is good news to the extent that it fortifies US-Brazil relations on the eve of a new presidential term in that country and that it spares US exporters from the threat of Brazilian retaliation, which could have reached a total of per year. Yet, in essence, the new deal perpetuates the unhealthy status quo whereby the United States pays Brazil ____ the right ____ continue propping _____ a domestic cotton industry that can ____ should learn to compete ____ its own.

Published by The Washington Post (The text below has been slightly modified to better suit the exam)

What does buy off mean as used in the text? 

Questão 3615

(Fuvest 2015 1 fase) A figura abaixo mostra o gráfico da energia potencial gravitacional U de uma esfera em uma pista, em função da componente horizontal x da posição da esfera na pista.

A esfera é colocada em repouso na pista, na posição de abscissa x = x₁, tendo energia
mecânica E < 0. A partir dessa condição, sua energia cinética tem valor:

Note e adote:
- desconsidere efeitos dissipativos.