Questões para Concursos

Google News, Thursday, June 16, 2021 Teaching methods keep changing with the times,................... the blackboard of the old days ........... electronic teaching today. Mr. Kam, physics instructor the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is one of those who has changed ......... the times. Mr. Kam employs a two-pronged approach. First , he uses multimedia teaching materials during lectures. Second , he arranges internships for undergraduates. These can take the form of learning assistantships at the university or teaching assistantships at secondary schools, and also there’s always the odd science project at the Space Museum. The initiatives have earned him the Faculty Exemplary Teaching Award 2020. A CUHK alumnus, he is grateful for the chance to teach at the university after earning his doctoral degree there. His teaching position actually represents the fulfillment of a dream, for the status of professors during his days as a university student was extremely high and he could meet them only during lectures. After being a teacher for 10 years, Mr. Kam has found no apparent regression in the learning abilities of students, but he believes teachers should not just force knowledge on students - they have to pay careful attention to their needs too. The multimedia materials that Mr. Kam uses to illustrate his area of interest includes animation and video clips. He encourages students to read popular astronomy magazines and share any note-worthy content they find. Mr. Kam also gets his undergraduates to help prepare students sitting for physics papers in public exams or to help out on research projects undertaken by meteorological officers at the observatory. He also arranges for his undergraduates to teach students from other faculties during physics liberal studies classes through talks and star-gazing expeditions. Such responsibilities serve two greater purposes. First, undergraduates become even more motivated to learn when they find out they have to guide other students. Second, physics students are, unlike arts students, not at their best when called upon to express themselves. Acting as assistants allows them to practice their skills and build up their self- confidence. I asked Mr. Kam what he found most satisfying in teaching. And the answer is obvious. It is the deep friendship he forms with students. Mr. Kam says many former students still come back to see him occasionally despite being busy parents. He draws considerable satisfaction from seeing his students grow into mature adults. For Mr. Kam, the best teachers will never find extracurricular activity a burden because the good work that is done today plants the seed for future generations.

Text II This book wants to show the newcomer the lie of the land without confusing him with details. In writing it I thought first and foremost of readers in their teens. But I have never believed that books for young people should differ from books for adults except for the fact that they must reckon with the most exacting class of critics, critics who are quick to detect and resent any trace of pretentious jargon or bogus sentiment. I know from experience that these are the vices which may render people suspicious of all writings. I have striven to use plain language even at the risk of sounding casual or unprofessional. I hope that no reader will attribute my decision to get along with a minimum of the art historian’s conventional terms to any desire on my part of ‘talking down’ to him. Apart from this decision, I have tried to follow a number of more specific self-imposed rules, such as limiting myself to real works of art and cutting out anything which might merely be interesting as a specimen of taste or fashion. This decision entailed a considerable sacrifice of literary effects. Praise is so much duller than criticism, and the inclusion of some amusing monstrosities might have offered some light relief. Thus, while I do not claim that all the works illustrated represent the highest standard of perfection, I did make an effort not to include anything which I considered to be without a peculiar merit of its own. A second rule also demanded a little self-denial. I vowed to resist any temptation to be original in my selection, lest the well-known masterpieces be crowded out by my own personal favourites. This book, after all, is not intended merely as an anthology of beautiful things; it is meant for those who look for bearings in a new field, and for them the familiar appearance of apparently ‘hackneyed’ examples may serve as welcome landmarks. One more rule I have followed. When in doubt I have always preferred to discuss a work which I had seen in the original rather than one I knew only from photographs. I should have liked to make this an absolute rule, but I did not want the reader to be penalized by the accidents of travel restrictions which sometimes dog the life of the art-lover. E. H. Gombrich. The Story of Art. Phaidon , New York – London: 1995, p. 7-8 (adapted).

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) had a broad and distinguished career both inside and outside the literary realm. She is most famous for her work as a poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She also worked in entertainment as a singer, a dancer, an actor, and a director. Her poetry was inspired and informed by her life and work, and this personal connection made her poems profound and powerful. Over the course of a career spanning the 1960s to her death in 2014, she captured, provoked, inspired, and ultimately transformed American people and culture. Internet: (adapted).

Text I Despite the tricky and life-threatening relationship between Paleolithic humans and the megafauna that comprised so much of their environment, twentieth-century scholars tended to claim cave art as evidence of an unalloyed triumph for our species. It was a “great spiritual symbol,” of a time when “man had just emerged from a purely zoological existence, when instead of being dominated by animals, he began to dominate them.” But the child-like and highly stylized stick figures found in caves do not radiate triumph. By the standards of our own time, they are excessively self-effacing and, compared to the animals portrayed around them, pathetically weak. While twentieth-century archeologists tended to solemnize prehistoric art as “magico-religious” or “shamanic,” today’s more secular viewers sometimes detect a vein of sheer silliness. India’s Mesolithic rock art portrays few human stick figures; those that are portrayed have been described by modern viewers as “comical,” “animalized” and “grotesque.” As Judith Thurman wrote about the artists, “despite their penchant for naturalism, rarely did they choose to depict human beings, and then did so with a crudeness that smacks of mockery.” But who are they mocking, other than themselves and, by extension, their distant descendants, ourselves? Of course, our reactions to Paleolithic art may bear no connection to the intentions or feelings of the artists. Yet there are reasons to believe that Paleolithic people had a sense of humor not all that dissimilar from our own. Barbara Ehrenreich. The Humanoid Stain. Later on. Internet: (adapted).

Text II This book wants to show the newcomer the lie of the land without confusing him with details. In writing it I thought first and foremost of readers in their teens. But I have never believed that books for young people should differ from books for adults except for the fact that they must reckon with the most exacting class of critics, critics who are quick to detect and resent any trace of pretentious jargon or bogus sentiment. I know from experience that these are the vices which may render people suspicious of all writings. I have striven to use plain language even at the risk of sounding casual or unprofessional. I hope that no reader will attribute my decision to get along with a minimum of the art historian’s conventional terms to any desire on my part of ‘talking down’ to him. Apart from this decision, I have tried to follow a number of more specific self-imposed rules, such as limiting myself to real works of art and cutting out anything which might merely be interesting as a specimen of taste or fashion. This decision entailed a considerable sacrifice of literary effects. Praise is so much duller than criticism, and the inclusion of some amusing monstrosities might have offered some light relief. Thus, while I do not claim that all the works illustrated represent the highest standard of perfection, I did make an effort not to include anything which I considered to be without a peculiar merit of its own. A second rule also demanded a little self-denial. I vowed to resist any temptation to be original in my selection, lest the well-known masterpieces be crowded out by my own personal favourites. This book, after all, is not intended merely as an anthology of beautiful things; it is meant for those who look for bearings in a new field, and for them the familiar appearance of apparently ‘hackneyed’ examples may serve as welcome landmarks. One more rule I have followed. When in doubt I have always preferred to discuss a work which I had seen in the original rather than one I knew only from photographs. I should have liked to make this an absolute rule, but I did not want the reader to be penalized by the accidents of travel restrictions which sometimes dog the life of the art-lover. E. H. Gombrich. The Story of Art. Phaidon , New York – London: 1995, p. 7-8 (adapted).

TEXT: How do people overcome fossilization and achieve nativelike fluency in second language acquisition? There are a lot of common misconceptions about fossilization and language development. It's impossible to correct all of them in a post here, but I'll address a few that have been mentioned below. Fossilization is a stage at which a second language speaker seems to cease making progress toward becoming more targetlike in his or her use of the language, so a "learning plateau" is a reasonable analogy. The comparison wherein "the L2 learner has his own linguistic system" that's still influenced by L1 and other things is known as the "interlanguage." The question researchers cannot conclusively answer is whether or not that "plateau" is reversible after a certain point, be it age, fluency level, etc., in order to start making progress again. Different people are motivated by different things, which range from need (to pass a test, to get a job, to watch movies without subtitles, to make friends, etc.) to learning style (preferring to study from texts, liking/disliking impromptu, small-talk with people just to practice, preference for/against learning formal rules, and aptitude). It is easy to remember verb conjugations. There is no single formula. Finding someone who can correct your errors tactfully and effectively most certainly does not need to be demotivating, depressing or draining whatsoever. I'm a very fluent non-native speaker of Spanish, and I actively request that my native speaker (NS) friends correct me when I make a mistake, or use a phrase that sounds funny in their dialect, etc. How else will I learn? It's fascinating to learn little details like that now after so many years. As long as they don't do it in a mocking or condescending way, or at a socially inappropriate time, why wouldn't I want their help? Of course, if you correct a beginner every time they try to utter a sentence, it could be discouraging - and obnoxious - but everything in moderation. One of the biggest cognitive challenges is whether or not L2 speakers can learn to consciously notice differences between their L2 efforts and the way a NS talks. There are decades of research on this (my own included) and I'll gladly give references if anyone actually cares. Noticing falls into two broad categories. First, the ability to " notice the gap ," i.e. hear a NS say a sentence and think, "Hmm, I understand what he meant but I've never heard that word before; it must mean ___" or "I know what he meant but it would not have occurred to me to say it that way; I'll try to remember that for later." The second is the ability to " notice the hole ," i.e. when the L2 learner is trying to speak/ write and realizes that his "interlanguage" lacks a word, sound or structure needed to accurately convey his own thought. If he can seek the input necessary to fill the hole, he has a much stronger chance of acquiring it. The thought processes involved during that moment are holding the forms (or lack thereof) in working memory, and the longer it stays there for further processing, the greater the possibility that it is retained in long-term memory for later use. The NS interlocutor can help promote noticing through corrective feedback (also a subject of decades of research, for which I'm also happy to provide resources if anyone is genuinely interested.) I have been using a variety of strategies for years as a language coach when working with my clients, whether helping IT executives from India and Egypt learn to write more grammatically accurate e-mail or helping priests from Nigeria improve prosodic aspects of their pronunciation (i.e. stress and intonation patterns.) Each person is different. I have found no evidence to support the argument that a person who has fossilized cannot begin to make progress again toward a more target-like L2 use at least in some areas, with the right motivation, input and effort. The question is only about how much progress, in what areas, in how much time, and through what methods. Adapted form: https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-overcome-fossilization-andachieve-native-like-fluency-in-second-language-acquisition Acesso em 22/09/2023

READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER THE QUESTION: Chatbots could be used to steal data, says cybersecurity agency The UK’s cybersecurity agency has warned that there is an increasing risk that chatbots could be manipulated by hackers. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said that individuals could manipulate the prompts of chatbots, which run on artificial intelligence by creating a language model and give answers to questions by users, through “prompt injection” attacks that would make them behave in an unintended manner. The point of a chatbot is to mimic human-like conversations, which it has been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data. Commonly used in online banking or online shopping, chatbots are generally designed to handle simple requests. Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI chatbot Bard, are trained using data that generates human-like responses to user prompts. Since chatbots are used to pass data to third-party applications and services, the NCSC has said that risks from malicious “prompt injection” will grow. For instance, if a user inputs a statement or question that a language model is not familiar with, or if they find a combination of words to override the model’s original script or prompts, the user can cause the model to perform unintended actions. Such inputs could cause a chatbot to generate offensive content or reveal confidential information in a system that accepts unchecked input. According to the NCSC, prompt injection attacks can also cause real world consequences, if systems are not designed with security. The vulnerability of chatbots and the ease with which prompts can be manipulated could cause attacks, scams and data theft. The large language models are increasingly used to pass data to third-party applications and services, meaning the risks from malicious prompt injection will grow. The NCSC said: “Prompt injection and data poisoning attacks can be extremely difficult to detect and mitigate. However, no model exists in isolation, so what we can do is design the whole system with security in mind.” The NCSC said that cyber-attacks caused by artificial intelligence and machine learning that leaves systems vulnerable can be mitigated through designing for security and understanding the attack techniques that exploit “inherent vulnerabilities” in machine learning algorithm. Adapted from: The Guardian , Wednesday 30 August 2023, page 4.

Text 1A1-II Brazil’s first scientific expedition to the Arctic aims to explore the biodiversity of one of the planet’s coldest territories, learn more about its ecological importance and its role in global climate change, and contribute to its preservation. The Brazilian team of scientists from the University of Brasília and the Federal University of Minas Gerais has been in the Svalbard archipelago—a section of the Arctic Circle that belongs to Norway—since July 8. According to the expert, research in the region is crucial in monitoring relevant developments in Brazil as well as worldwide. “What happens here in the Arctic affects Brazil, so we should have the right to speak and vote, which is not happening.” Brazil is the only among the ten largest global economies without a voice on issues related to the region. Therefore, Brazil’s scientific presence in the Arctic—a region covering more than 16 million square kilometers—can prove significant for the inclusion of the nation as an observer member of the Arctic Council, the international cooperation body on environmental strategies for the territory. The country should also join the Svalbard Treaty, which not only recognizes Norway’s sovereignty over the archipelago, but also grants access to the area’s resources for signatory nations. Internet: (adapted).

Text 1A1-II Brazil’s first scientific expedition to the Arctic aims to explore the biodiversity of one of the planet’s coldest territories, learn more about its ecological importance and its role in global climate change, and contribute to its preservation. The Brazilian team of scientists from the University of Brasília and the Federal University of Minas Gerais has been in the Svalbard archipelago—a section of the Arctic Circle that belongs to Norway—since July 8. According to the expert, research in the region is crucial in monitoring relevant developments in Brazil as well as worldwide. “What happens here in the Arctic affects Brazil, so we should have the right to speak and vote, which is not happening.” Brazil is the only among the ten largest global economies without a voice on issues related to the region. Therefore, Brazil’s scientific presence in the Arctic—a region covering more than 16 million square kilometers—can prove significant for the inclusion of the nation as an observer member of the Arctic Council, the international cooperation body on environmental strategies for the territory. The country should also join the Svalbard Treaty, which not only recognizes Norway’s sovereignty over the archipelago, but also grants access to the area’s resources for signatory nations. Internet: (adapted).