Questões para Concursos

Text CG2A2

A new study on physical activity that involved more than half a million participants over age 40 found that modest exercise increases life expectancy regardless of weight.
Contrary to most of the attention given to obesity as the crucial risk factor for health, the study found that an active lifestyle increased life expectancy to a greater extent than a lower body mass index (BMI), in general. In fact, participants who were active but class 1 obese lived an average of 3.1 years longer than those who were at a normal weight but didn’t engage in physical activity. This is in-line with reports from earlier this year that excessive sitting is unhealthy and that reducing excessive sitting to less than 3 hours a day alone can improve longevity by 2.0 years.
The article states low level of physical activity of moderate to vigorous intensity would confer a 1.8-year gain in life expectancy after age 40, compared with no activity. A low level of physical activity is defined as up to 75 minutes of fast walking per week.
A consequence of this study is that it calls into question the reliance on BMI to assess fitness. That isn’t to suggest that BMI isn’t a factor, but that what we’ve heard for years in the media that being overweight is “bad” for you while exercise is “good” is a flawed message. A better message would be: Regular exercise is essential to longevity and a lower BMI helps too — do the first and the other will likely follow.

Internet: (adapted).

Judge the following items according to the ideas presented in text CG2A2.

Text 1A2-I

Languages are more to us than systems of thought-transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expression. When the expression is of unusual significance, we call it literature. Art is so personal an expression that we do not like to feel that it is bound to predetermined form of any sort. The possibilities of individual expression are infinite, language in particular is the most fluid of mediums. Yet some limitation there must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium.
In great art there is the illusion of absolute freedom. The formal restraints imposed by the material are not perceived; it is as though there were a limitless margin of elbow room between the artist’s fullest utilization of form and the most that the material is innately capable of. The artist has intuitively surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material, made its brute nature fuse easily with his conception. The material “disappears” precisely because there is nothing in the artist’s conception to indicate that any other material exists. For the time being, he, and we with him, move in the artistic medium as a fish moves in the water, oblivious of the existence of an alien atmosphere. No sooner, however, does the artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a medium to obey.
Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor. Since every language has its distinctive peculiarities, the innate formal limitations—and possibilities—of one literature are never quite the same as those of another. The literature fashioned out of the form and substance of a language has the color and the texture of its matrix. The literary artist may never be conscious of just how he is hindered or helped or otherwise guided by the matrix, but when it is a question of translating his work into another language, the nature of the original matrix manifests itself at once. All his effects have been calculated, or intuitively felt, with reference to the formal “genius” of his own language; they cannot be carried over without loss or modification. Croce is therefore perfectly right in saying that a work of literary art can never be translated. Nevertheless, literature does get itself translated, sometimes with astonishing adequacy.

Edward Sapir. Language: an introduction to the study of speech. 1921 (adapted).

Microplastics found in human heart for first time

A new study suggests invasive medical procedures may be an overlooked route of microplastics exposure, raising concerns about potential health risks. Minute particles of plastic (called microplastics) are everywhere. They’ve been found in our water, in our food, and in the air we breathe, according to a 2021 scientific review. Just a year later, another study found microplastics in the human bloodstream. Now, in what researchers are calling a first, microplastics have been detected in the heart tissues of individuals who underwent cardiac surgery.
According to the author of the research, the detection of microplastics in vivo is alarming, and more studies are necessary to investigate how the microparticles enter the cardiac tissues and the potential effects of microplastics on long-term prognosis after cardiac surgery. The author and his team used direct infrared imaging, and identified 20 to 500 micrometer-wide particles made from eight types of plastic. The scientists also found plastic particles in blood samples collected from participants. They added that “microplastics are highly likely to distribute in various organs throughout the body.”
A fraction of the plastic pieces identified had a diameter too large to likely enter the body through inhalation or ingestion, according to the analysis. This indicated that the heart operation itself may permit direct access of microplastics to the bloodstream and tissues. The researchers cited previous scientific investigation showing that microplastics have been detected in the air in operating rooms and could directly enter a patient whose organs are exposed to the air during surgery.
Such large particles may also come from equipment and materials used in a heart operation, including surgical incision protective film, intravenous therapy bags, tubing, and syringes. The types of plastics detected might also offer evidence that microplastics could be introduced during surgery, which may raise the risk of heart disease.
Internet: (adapted).

Based on the preceding text, judge the following items.

Welcome To the Next Generation Of Business Intelligence

The Business Intelligence (BI) industry has long promised a future where every worker can use data to make smarter business decisions. Although that promise continues to be out of reach for most companies, the industry has come a long way over the past few decades, and we believe we are on the cusp of a new generation of BI that will finally turn that promise into reality.
Business Intelligence is built on an old data culture that relies on technical experts. In the early days of reporting, those experts were called IT. As technology evolved and tools became easier, the progression of BI moved to reports and dashboards delivered by new experts—analysts. This made analytics more accessible, but still didn’t make self-service data insights a reality across the business. Here’s why: Instead of using technology to put data in front of people where they already are working, we continue to ask people to leave their business apps and turn to dedicated tools or dashboards for answers.
This process is disruptive and inefficient, and often causes users to write it off completely. Dashboards don’t have built-in analytics processes; they share information but do not provide recommended courses of action at the right moment or in a decision maker’s workflow. Business professionals want exactly that: They want a final answer and recommendations on what to do next. They would rather have data and actionable insights come in easily digestible bites versus needing to dig for answers in dashboards and reports. And the truth is they are digging; dashboards are often too broad to address multiple questions, too difficult to customize, and frankly, have too many insights.
For analytics to advance, we must extend dashboards or deliver personalized intelligence to more decision makers. In fact, experts predict that “dashboards will be replaced with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized to a user’s needs and delivered to their point of consumption. This shifts the insight knowledge from a handful of data experts to anyone in the organization.” Now, instead of wasting time jumping from where the data resides (in dashboards) to where work is done, embedded analytics enables users to do both simultaneously: get insights and take action.
Internet: (adapted).

Based on the preceding text, judge the following items.

Text 7A2
When it comes to the vocabulary of languages, is it true, as some suppose, that the vocabularies of so-called primitive languages are too small and inadequate to account for the nuances of the physical and social universes of their speakers? The answer is somewhat complicated. Because the vocabulary of a language serves only the members of the society who speak it, the question to be asked should be: Is a particular vocabulary sufficient to serve the sociocultural needs of those who use the language? When put like this, it follows that the language associated with a relatively simple culture would have a smaller vocabulary than the language of a complex society. Why, for example, should the Inuit people (often known by the pejorative term “Eskimo”) have words for chlorofluoromethane, dune buggy, or tae kwon do when these substances, objects, and concepts play no part in their culture? By the same token, however, the language of a tribal society would have elaborate lexical domains for prominent aspects of the culture although these do not exist in complex societies. The Agta of the Philippines, for example, are reported to have no fewer than thirty-one verbs referring to types of fishing, while in Munich, the terminology for the local varieties of beer is quite extensive, according to strength, color, fizziness, aging, and clarity, the full list exceeding seventy terms.
However, even though no language spoken today may be labeled primitive, this does not mean that all languages do all things in the same way, or are equally influential in the modern transnational world. The linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes claims that languages are not functionally equivalent because the role of speech varies from one society to the next. According to Hymes, though all languages “are potentially equal and hence capable of adaptation to the needs of a complex industrial civilization”, only certain languages have actually done so (Hymes 1961:77). These languages are more successful than others not because they are structurally more advanced, but because they happen to be associated with societies in which language is the basis of literature, education, science, and commerce.
Zdenek SALZMANN, James M. STANLAW and Nobuko ADACHI.
Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology.
Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2012. p. 6-7 (adapted).
Judge the following items, related to text 7A2 and its subject.

Text 1A11-I

Internet: < www.gocomics.com > (adapted).

Text 1A2-III

In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty years. He had inspired two generations of Indian patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a revolution which was to change the face of Africa and Asia. To millions of his own people, he was the Mahatma — the great soul — whose sacred glimpse was a reward in itself.
By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he had to face, when he first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and utopian, had begun to strike answering chords in some of the finest minds in the world. “Generations to come, it may be,” Einstein had said of Gandhi in July 1944, “will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon earth.”
Though his life had been a continual unfolding of an endless drama, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men. It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings of political eminence or with less of the popular image of a heroic figure. With his loin cloth, steel-rimmed glasses, rough sandals, a toothless smile and a voice which rarely rose above a whisper, he had a disarming humility. He was, if one were to use the famous words of the Buddha, a man who had “by rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint and control, made for himself an island which no flood could overwhelm.”
Gandhi’s deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did not — as had been the custom in his country — retire to a cave in the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within him. He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human activity; the spiritual law did not work in a vacuum, but expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life.
This aspiration to relate the spirit of religion to the problems of everyday life runs like a thread through Gandhi’s career: his uneventful childhood, the slow unfolding and the near-failure of his youth, the reluctant plunge into the politics of Natal, the long unequal struggle in South Africa, and the vicissitudes of the Indian struggle for freedom, which under his leadership was to culminate in a triumph not untinged with tragedy.

B. R. Nanda. Gandhi: a pictorial biography, 1972 (adapted).

Data art is a form of digital art that uses data as a medium or source material to create visually appealing and meaningful representations. It often involves the use of algorithms, software, and technology to turn data into something that can be seen, such as a graph, chart, or animation. The goal is to convey emotions to the audience by sharing insights, patterns, or stories hidden within the data in an accessible and creative way. Data artist Kirell Benzi adds that, because it is based on data, the piece has a more objective truth behind its construction and does not solely come from the artist’s imagination.
Still emerging, Data Art has nonetheless existed for decades. What stands it apart, from the other digital art categories, is the complex interaction between material, process, and expression.
The artist Aaron Koblin once argued that “data can make us more human”. As part of a project to put this forward, he made Flight Patterns . The summary purpose explains it all: Interpreting a series of flight data and, once processed, a wide range of human behaviors appears. It is how we all flow through technology.

Internet: (adapted).

Considering the information stated in the precedent text and the vocabulary used in it, judge the following items.

Text 7A1
Artificial intelligence still has difficulties processing requests in one language, without the additional complications of translation. Michael Housman, chief data science officer at RapportBoost.AI, explained that the ideal scenario for machine learning and artificial intelligence is something with fixed rules and a clear-cut measure of success or failure. He named chess as an obvious example. This happened faster than anyone anticipated because of the game’s very clear rules and limited set of moves. Housman elaborated, “Language is almost the opposite of that. There aren’t as clearly-cut and defined rules.”
I asked Dr. Jorge Majfud, Associate Professor of Spanish, at Jacksonville University, to explain why consistently accurate language translation has thus far eluded AI. He replied, “The problem is that considering the ‘entire’ sentence is still not enough.” He noted that sarcasm and irony only make sense within this widened context. Similarly, idioms can be problematic for automated translations.
Dr. Majfud warned, “We should be aware of the fragility of their ‘interpretation.’ Because to translate is basically to interpret, not just an idea but a feeling. Human feelings and ideas that only humans can understand — and sometimes not even we, humans, understand other humans.” He noted that cultures, gender, and even age can pose barriers to this understanding and also contended that an over-reliance on technology is leading to our cultural and political decline. Dr. Majfud mentioned that Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar used to refer to dictionaries as “cemeteries”. He suggested that automatic translators could be called “zombies”.
David Pring-Mill. Why Hasn’t AI Mastered Language Translation?Internet: (adapted)
Considering information from text 7A1, judge the following items.

Text CB2A2

Anyone who has interacted with superbot ChatGPT or image generator DALL-E might be wondering what the future of artificial intelligence (AI) holds for humanity.
ChatGPT is an AI program that generates text in a very human-like manner when asked questions. Just ask DALL-E or similar programs to create a picture of a French bulldog driving a pink convertible and voila: you’ll see several versions in seconds.
Science fiction in the mid-20th century created good-natured AI such as the computer on Star Trek helping the Enterprise crew, as well as its evil twin set on destroying its creators like HAL in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous book (or Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film adaptation) 2001: A Space Odyssey . In 2023, however, we’re surrounded by AI that’s far more mundane than those examples. The virtual assistant in your smartphone, the airline chatbot and the robot vacuum cleaning your floors don’t seem to have any aspirations to rise above humanity and have been designed to help us.
We should be prepared for bigger things to come than games, better chatbots or photo generators. Connectivity is key: think of AI as a general-purpose innovation like electricity that powers and connects other technologies, including sensors, robots, genomic devices and 3D printers. AI’s use will only intensify and accelerate as faster computing technology is developed, along with greater sensors capturing data, often called the Internet of Things (IoT). In the future, AI will be interwoven in virtually every aspect of commercial and personal activities.
Peter Marber. Artificial Intelligence : Why Should We Care?. Internet: (adapted).

Judge the following items according to the information given in text CB2A2.