Questões para Concursos

Environmental and economic impacts of crude oil and natural gas production in developing countries

Environmental impacts that occur during the production of crude oil would mostly occur from long-term habitat change within the oil and gas field, production activities (including facility component maintenance or replacement), waste management (e.g. produced water), noise (e.g. from well operations, compressor or pump stations, flare stack, vehicle and equipment), the presence of workers and potential spills.
The adverse environmental impacts which could happen during production of crude oil and natural gas include: disturbance of wildlife due to noise and human activity; exposure of biota to contaminants; and mortality of biota resulting from collisions against aboveground facilities or with vehicles.
The presence of production wells, ancillary facilities and access road reduces habitat quality, disturbs the biota and thus affects ecological resources. Discharge of produced water inappropriately onto soil or into surface water bodies can result in salinity levels becoming too high to sustain plant growth.
Wildlife is always prone to have contact with petroleum-based products and other contaminants in reserve pits and water management facilities. Animals could become entrapped in the oil and drown, or they could ingest toxic quantities of oil, or succumb to cold stress if the oil damages the insulation provided by their feathers or fur.
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In May 2021, a hole was found in a robotic arm aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The suspected culprit was a piece of rogue space junk. While thankfully no astronauts were injured, it has re-focussed attention on the growing problem of orbital debris.
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How did we get here?
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It’s easy to forget that just seven decades ago the Moon
was the only thing orbiting the Earth. On 1 January 2021 there
were 6,542 satellites in orbit. Tellingly, only just over half of
them were active. That’s a lot of useless metal careering around
the planet at 28,000 kph — ten times faster than a bullet.
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How bad is the problem?
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Very bad and getting worse. Estimates suggest there are
currently half a million pieces of debris the size of a marble or
larger and 100 million pieces of debris above one millimeter
across. Yet only 27,000 pieces are actively tracked by the US
Department of Defense.
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What is Kessler syndrome?
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It’s a catastrophic chain of events in which a satellite is
shattered by a piece of space junk (or a collision with another
satellite) and the resulting debris destroys more satellites creating
more junk and so on in a never-ending cascade. It’s a domino
effect – one piece falls and then takes the rest with it – and is
named after NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who outlined the
dangers back in 1978.
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What can we do about it?
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Better regulation of new launches would help, as right
now it’s a bit of a free-for-all. There are existing regulations in
place to try and mitigate the dangers, such as a 25-year de-orbit
rule for missions in low-Earth orbit. However, ESA’s Space
Debris Environment Report says that less than 60 per cent of
those flying in low-Earth orbit currently stick to the rules.
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Colin Stuart. Space Junk : Is it a disaster waiting to happen?
Internet: (adapted).
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Considering the text above, judge the following items.

Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, based on a standard cathode ray tube, but the information stored in it was volatile in that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of nonvolatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.
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Information Technology. Internet: (adapted).
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Considering the text above, judge the following items.

Text 4A1-I

President Joe Biden predicted Thursday that student loan borrowers will start receiving relief – which is currently on hold over a court challenge – within weeks, projecting confidence that his administration will win the challenge. “We’re going to win that case. I think in the next two weeks you’re going to see those checks going out”, Biden told a TV news correspondent.
The Biden administration started taking student debt forgiveness applications on October 14 and officials have said it could take weeks to process and grant relief. Eligible borrowers won’t be receiving actual checks. Instead, they will see up to a $ 20,000 reduction in their student debt balances. The Department of Education has told borrowers who are eligible for automatic debt relief, without filing an application, not to expect the debt cancellation before November 14.
A federal appeals court put a temporary hold on the administration’s student loan forgiveness program last week, which barred the government from canceling loans covered under the new policy while the court considers a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. The Biden administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and conservative groups such as the Job Creators Network Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, first announced in August, aims to deliver debt relief to millions of borrowers before federal student loan payments resume in January after a nearly three-year, pandemic-related pause.
The President made his comments during an interview with a local TV station network during his visit to Syracuse, New York, to tout a new deal on semiconductor manufacturing. With less than two weeks until the midterm elections Biden took questions on the economy, his message to voters, and the stalled student debt relief program. President Joe Biden is canceling some federal student loan debt, making a once pie-in-the-sky idea a reality. The application officially opened Monday, allowing low- and middle-class federal student loan borrowers to apply for up to $ 20,000 in debt relief.

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In a world where many of us are glued to our smartphones, Dulcie Cowling is something of an anomaly — she has ditched hers. The 36-year-old decided at the end of last year that getting rid of her handset would improve her mental health. So, over Christmas she told her family and friends that she was switching to an old Nokia phone that could only make and receive calls and text messages.
She recalls that one of the pivotal moments that led to her decision was a day at the park with her two boys, aged six and three: “I was on my mobile at a playground with the kids and I looked up and every single parent — there was up to 20 — were looking at their phones, just scrolling away,” she says.
“I thought ‘when did this happen?’. Everyone is missing out on real life. I don’t think you get to your death bed and think you should have spent more time on Twitter, or reading articles online.”
Ms Cowling, who is a creative director at London-based advertising agency Hell Yeah!, adds that the idea to abandon her smartphone had built up during the covid-19 lockdowns.
“I thought about how much of my life is spent looking at the phone and what else could I do. Being constantly connected to lots of services creates a lot of distractions, and is a lot for the brain to process.”
She plans to use the time gained from quitting her smartphone to read and sleep more.
About nine out of 10 people in the UK now own a smartphone, a figure broadly replicated across the developed world. And we are glued to them — one recent study found that the average person spends 4.8 hours a day on their handset.
Yet for a small, but growing number of people, enough is enough.
Alex Dunedin binned his smartphone two years ago. “Culturally we have become addicted to these tools,” says the educational researcher and technology expert. “They are blunting cognition and impeding productivity.”
He has become happier and more productive since he stopped using a smartphone, he says.
Mr Dunedin doesn’t even have an old-fashioned mobile phone or even a landline anymore. He is instead only electronically contactable via emails to his home computer.
“It has improved my life,” he says. “My thoughts are freed up from constantly being cognitively connected to a machine that I need to feed with energy and money. I think that the danger of technologies is that they are emptying our lives.”
Yet, while some worry about how much time they spend on their handset, for millions of others they are a godsend.
“More than ever, access to healthcare, education, social services and often to our friends and family is digital, and the smartphone is an essential lifeline for people,” says a spokesperson for UK mobile network Vodafone.
“We also create resources to help people get the most from their tech, as well as to stay safe when they’re online — that’s hugely important.”

Suzanne Bearne. The people deciding to ditch their smartphones .
Internet: (adapted).

Considering the previous text, judge the following items.

Jack Kilby’s revolutionary idea was to make all the different components of a circuit out of the same flat block of semiconductor material. Not only would this get rid of wires and faulty connections, it would make the entire circuit much more compact. Kilby demonstrated his first “integrated circuit” on Sept. 12, 1958.
Six months later, in California, another engineer, Robert Noyce, independently came up with the idea of making an integrated circuit. Noyce’s chip was better suited to be manufactured in large numbers, and soon he was part of a young company called Intel.
Thus was launched a revolution. The first chip-based computer was the first U.S. Air Force computer, built in 1961. The true potential of the integrated circuit was shown when Texas Instruments unveiled the pocket calculator. Previously calculators had been bulky devices that needed to be plugged in to electrical mains. The pocket calculator, small enough to hold in one’s palm, had a chip inside and batteries were adequate to power it.
Progress was rapid thereafter. Many have already heard of Moore’s law, which has become a mantra of the digital age. First put forward by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the 1960s, it says that the processing power of a chip doubles every two years, while the price falls by half. For more than four decades, Moore’s law has held, driving incredible growth and miniaturization — and wealth.
The question is whether the semiconductor industry can sustain this pace. Further increasing the processing power of chips is proving to be problematic as certain fundamental physical barriers are being reached. At the same time, new frontiers are opening up. The quest is on to make chips that are powered by light instead of electricity, which will enable much faster computers.
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Saswato Das. The Chip that Changed the World . Internet: (adapted).
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Considering the text above, judge the following items.

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun — a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Mars is also a dynamic planet with seasons, polar ice caps, canyons, extinct volcanoes, and evidence that it was even more active in the past.
No other planet has captured our collective imagination quite like Mars.
In the late 1800s when people first observed the canal-like features on Mars’ surface, many speculated that an intelligent alien species resided there. This led to numerous stories about Martians, some of whom invade Earth, like in the 1938 radio drama, The War of the Worlds. According to an enduring urban legend, many listeners believed the story to be real news coverage of an invasion, causing widespread panic.
Countless stories since have taken place on Mars or explored the possibilities of its Martian inhabitants. Movies like Total Recall (1990 and 2012) take us to a terraformed Mars and a struggling colony running out of air. A Martian colony and Earth have a prickly relationship in The Expanse television series and novels.
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Internet: (adapted).
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Judge the following items, based on the previous text.

After two collapses, a third dam at ‘imminent risk of rupture’

A dam holding back mining waste from a Brazilian miner is at risk of collapsing, a government audit says. The same company was responsible for two tailings dam collapses since 2015 that unleashed millions of gallons of toxic sludge and killed hundreds of people in Brazil’s southeastern state of Minas Gerais, which has been known worldwide as the Brumadinho Dam Collapse.
The retired Xingu dam at Alegria iron ore mine in Mariana — the same municipality where a tailings dam collapsed in November 2015 in what’s considered Brazil’s worst environmental disaster to date — is at “serious and imminent risk of rupture by liquefaction,” according to an audit report from a local state organ. The report says the Xingu dam “does not present stability conditions.” “It is, therefore, an extremely serious situation that puts at risk workers who perform activities, access or remain on the crest, on the downstream slopes, in the flood area and in the area on the tailings upstream of the dam,” the document says.
The ANM (National Mining Agency) rated the Xingu dam’s safety at level 2 in a September 2020 assessment, after requesting the company to improve the structure. The miner has fulfilled part of the request, but has sought a deadline extension for other repair works, without major changes in the structure. In its most recent inspection, ANM identified structural problems where no corrective measures had been implemented.

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In 1863, in an effort to reduce street traffic, London opened the world’s first underground line, the Metropolitan Railway. Its birth can be traced back two decades before to the building of the world’s first under-river tunnel below the Thames, which swiftly became both popular with pedestrians and a huge tourist attraction.
Initially, what would become the London Underground consisted of tracks dug slightly below the surface and then covered over, but as the technology improved, and trains switched from steam-powered to electric, the lines went deeper. Now the ground beneath Londoners’ feet hums with an extensive network of Tube lines ferrying people about the city speedily, efficiently — and out of sight.
Along with trains, powerlines, pipes, and cables, there’s another piece of infrastructure some have long wished to bury — roads. To some, these thick asphalt ribbons crisscrossing countries and cleaving apart communities and ecosystems no longer seem fit for purpose. As they sprawl longer and wider in the hopes of speeding up traffic, congestion ticks upwards and cars continue to pollute the air and spew greenhouse gases.
No one has suggested burying every single one of the world’s roads. But what would happen if we did relocate them all below the surface? In a time of increasing urbanization, soaring inequality and climate crisis, imagining the impact this could have raises important questions about how our global transport system is developing — and prompts us to consider where we really want it to go.

What if all roads went underground? Internet: (adapted).

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Russia is making heaps of money from oil, but there is a way to stop that

The United States and its allies are leaning heavily on economic sanctions to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But a key element in that strategy, restrictions on Russian oil exports, mostly appears to be causing pain for ordinary people in other countries. European nations, in particular, are causing considerable damage to their own economies without reducing Russia’s oil revenue.
Nations seeking to help Ukraine have focused on reducing Russia’s energy exports instead of reducing Russia’s earnings from energy exports. Russia is exporting less oil but, in a perverse twist, it is earning more money. The sanctions have raised prices, more than offsetting the decline in exports. In May 2022, Russia earned 883 million euros per day from oil exports, up from 633 million euros per day in May 2021.
New sanctions that the European Union and Britain have agreed to impose on Russia by year’s end are likely to drive oil prices even higher. Some analysts warn that the price for a barrel of oil could exceed $ 200, well above the spike in the early weeks of the war, when oil prices topped out around $ 124.
Internet: (adapted).

Based on the text above, judge the following items.