A ferramenta completa para a sua preparação em concursos
35.421 questões encontradas
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Gerúndio após Preposições | Gerunds After Prepositions
Ano: 2023 Banca: DIRENS AERONÁUTICA - Diretoria de Ensino da Aeronáutica Órgão: Ministério da Defesa - Aeronáutica
Complete the following sentence with the correct preposition.
Some planes can fly for more than five hours _________ one of their engines go out.
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Sinônimos | Synonyms
Ano: 2023 Banca: IBFC - Instituto Brasileiro de Formação e Capacitação Órgão: Secretaria de Estado da Educação do Paraná
Text 2 – Computers
(Text adapted from History of Computing. Retrieved from https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mitra/csFall2006/cs303/lectures/history.html)
When you hear the term computers, it’s difficult to imagine different devices from a laptop or a small desktop. Believe it or not, they weren’t always like they are today. They used to be very large and heavy, sometimes as big as an entire room. Some technology professors historically define computers, as “a device that can help with computations”. The word computation involves counting, calculating, adding, subtracting, etc. The modern definition of a computer is a little wider, because in our day and age, computers store, compile, analyze and compute an enormous amount of information. Ancient computers were very interesting. Actually, the first computer may have been located in Great Britain, at Stonehenge. It is a man-made circle of large stones. Citizens used it to measure the weather and forecast the change of seasons. Some specialists say that another ancient computer is the abacus. It was used by the early Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians to count and calculate. Even though they are no longer in use, certainly, these early devices are fascinating. Computers are embedded in our history and some people say that we are completely dependent of them. No matter the complexity of the task, easy or difficult, some people can’t do anything without them. Do you contest or share this opinion?
The word “located”, highlighted in the text, has a meaning equivalent to one of the following alternatives, check it.
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Referência em Textos | Reference Words
Ano: 2023 Banca: FUNDATEC - Fundação Universidade Empresa de Tecnologia e Ciências Órgão: Banco Regional de Desenvolvimento do Extremo Sul
Instruction: answer questions 13 to 19 based on the following text. The highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.
The Bizarre Story of the Swedish Warship “Vasa”
01 Vasa was the world’s most high-tech warship when it set sail. Today, it’s a resource for
02 naval historians and archaeologists – and a tale that haunts those who seek to design new
03 technology. Despite being one of the Swedish navy’s biggest achievements, Vasa sank within
04 twenty minutes of setting sail, on August 10, 1628. When it left Stockholm Harbor, the warship
05 survived the first blast of wind it encountered, but not the second. The sinking took place nowhere
06 near an enemy. In fact, it sank in full view of a horrified public, gathered to see off their navy’s –
07 and Europe’s – most ambitious warship to date.
08 Vasa was covered in wooden carvings that told stories about the Swedish royal family, and
09 most importantly the king, Gustav II Adolf. It was the king who ordered the ship, which carried
10 an unprecedented 64 bronze cannons. Soon after, an investigation concluded that the ship had
11 been unstable, but the reasons behind the instability have remained a point of debate over the
12 centuries. Archaeologists think it sank because the gun deck was far too heavy – the result of a
13 design made by someone with no experience building such a well-armed ship. It didn’t help that
14 the king rushed the building process.
15 Although Vasa ___ (not work) out well for Gustav II Adolf, it’s a paradise for archaeologists:
16 the cold, oxygen-poor water of the Baltic Sea ___ (protect) Vasa from the bacteria and worms
17 that usually digest wooden wrecks, and perhaps 95 percent of Vasa’s wood ___ (be) intact when
18 Sweden finally ___ (raise) the wreck in 1961. Now that the ship is stable, investigators have
19 worked to uncover why it sank. The events of 1628 had such a big impact that the sinking is a
20 case study business experts still read about. The management world has a name for human
21 problems of communication and management that cause projects to founder and fail – Vasa
22 syndrome. There was an overemphasis on the ship’s elegance and firepower and reduced
23 importance on its seaworthiness and stability.
24 The remains of the ship can be found in Stockholm’s Vasa Museum. According to the
25 museum, it is the only preserved 17th-century ship in the world, and the museum is a place for
26 historical and anthropological study as well as for visitors from around the globe.
(Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bizarre-story-vasa-ship-keeps-giving-180964328/ – text especially adapted for this test).
The highlighted words “it” (l. 06), “their” (l. 06), “who” (l. 09), and “which” (l. 09), in the order they are mentioned in the article, refer to:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Metodologias e Abordagens de Ensino | Teaching Methods And Approaches
Ano: 2023 Banca: UPENET IAUPE - Instituto de Apoio à Universidade de Pernambuco Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de São José da Coroa Grande
Text 3 (for question 41)
This method was widely used in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emphasis was not on the understanding of words, but rather on the acquisition of structures and patterns in common everyday dialogue. It gave students a lot of speaking practice by using habit-formation drills. Other characteristics of this method are:
The teaching method focused on in text 3 is called
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Second Conditional
Ano: 2023 Banca: SSPM - Serviço de Seleção do Pessoal da Marinha Órgão: Colégio Naval
Which sentence shows an unreal situation?
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Metodologias e Abordagens de Ensino | Teaching Methods And Approaches
Ano: 2023 Banca: IFMT - Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso Órgão: Instituto Federal de Mato Grosso
In teachers’ training programs, many methods and approaches are presented, among them, the audio-lingual method that grew into prominence in the 1950s in the USA. During the Second World War, US officials felt the need for translators and interpreters who were fluent in major foreign languages. In 1942, a special training program was organized to train fluent foreign speakers in a short time which is why this method is also referred to as the Army Method. According to the discouraged audio-lingual method, it is NOT CORRECT to say that:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: Objetiva Concursos Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Guarani das Missões
Spectacular fossil fish reveal a critical period of evolution
Before animals crawled out of the sea and spread onto land, the appearance of jaws marked a significant time in the development of nearly all living vertebrates, including humans.
Over hundreds of millions of years, chance and survival have sculpted an extraordinary menagerie of vertebrate life that __________ on land, in the air, and in the water. Vertebrates are animals with spinal columns, including humans, and arguably the single biggest step in vertebrate evolutionary history - even more significant than our distant aquatic forebears’ first waddles onto land - is something we may take for granted: the evolution of the jaw.
From vocalizing to biting food, the jaw is essential to the survival of 99.8 percent of living vertebrates. Only a precious few animals with spines, such as lampreys and hagfish, have made it to modern times without these hinged mouth structures.
The rich story of how jawed vertebrates spread to all corners of the globe - a saga _________ some 450 million years - has long been missing the first few pages. But now rocks in western China have yielded spectacular fossils that show us some of this story’s earliest characters: jawed fish that are the oldest skeletons of their kind ever found. Across four papers published in the journal Nature, a team of Chinese paleontologists and international collaborators describes sites that preserve astoundingly complete fossils of these earliest known jawed vertebrates, including bones and teeth from fish ____________ to have lived between 439 million and 436 million years ago, tens of millions of years before animals moved onto land.
The new studies’ fossils are remarkably complete. Remains found in China’s Chongqing municipality include a new inch-long close cousin to sharks, as well as a newfound type of early armored fish. In addition, fossils found farther south in the province of Guizhou include the spines of an ancient shark cousin and the oldest known teeth of a jawed vertebrate - tiny semicircular arcs of pointy teeth, barely a few millimeters across.
Taken together, the material “shows us for the first time a chunk of our own evolutionary history,” says Per Ahlberg, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who co-authored one of the four studies. “We’ve known it’s existed, we’ve known it’s really important, but we haven’t had any direct evidence for it basically at all - and then suddenly, boom, here it comes.”
(Fonte: National Geographic - adaptado.)
In “[…]shows us for the first time a chunk of our own evolutionary history […]”, the underlined word can be substituted without loss of meaning by:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: VUNESP - Fundação para o Vestibular da Universidade Estadual Paulista Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Guararema
Leia o texto a seguir para responder às questões de 44 a 47.
Human beings approach any new problem with an existing set of cognitive structures and, through insight, logical thinking, and various forms of testing hypotheses, call upon whatever prior experiences they have had, and whatever cognitive structures they possess to attempt a solution. In the literature of language learning processes, three terms have commonly been singled out for explanation: transfer, interference, and overgeneralization. The three terms can be understood as several manifestations of one principle of learning - the interaction of previously learned material with a present learning event.
Transfer is a general term describing the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to a subsequent learning. Positive transfer occurs when the prior knowledge benefits the learning task - that is, when a previous item is correctly applied to the present subject matter. Negative transfer occurs when previous performance disrupts the performance of a second task. The latter can be referred to as interference.
In the literature on second language acquisition, interference is almost as frequent as the term overgeneralization, which is, of course, a particular subset of generalization - a crucially important and pervading strategy in human learning. To generalize means to infer or derive a law, rule, or conclusion, usually from the observation of particular instances.
In second language acquisition it has been common to refer to overgeneralization as a process that occurs as the second language learner acts within the target language, generalizing a particular rule or item in the second language - irrespective of the native language - beyond legitimate bounds.
(BROWN, H.Douglas. Principles of language learning and teaching. 5th ed. Longman, 2000. P 103. Adaptado)
The excerpt from the second paragraph “that is, when a previous item is correctly applied to the present subject matter” works as
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FUNDATEC - Fundação Universidade Empresa de Tecnologia e Ciências Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Maçambara
Instruction: answer questions 26 to 36 based on the following text. The highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.
Try these expert tips for a safer solo trip
(Available at: https://news.airbnb.com/try-these-expert-tips-for-a-safer-solo-trip/ – text especially adapted for this text).
Analyze the following statements about the text and mark T, if true, or F, if false.
( ) Traveling at night should be avoided, so you do not arrive at a place you do not know when you may be not fully awake and alert.
( ) People should keep their passports with them at all times when traveling, because this is the only identification accepted when you are abroad.
( ) If you need help or if you get lost, you should try to look confident and choose carefully the person you will talk to.
The correct order of filling the parentheses, from top to bottom, is:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: VUNESP - Fundação para o Vestibular da Universidade Estadual Paulista Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Guararema
Read the excerpt to answer questions 48 and 49.
• In this stage the teacher presents the new grammar concept or vocabulary in a meaningful context or situation to their learners. The aim: ensure that the students understand the context.
• Students begin to use the elements of the target language that they learned previously through activities developed and controlled by the educator. The aim: build students’ accurate use of language.
• Once learners have demonstrated that they fully understand the key learning points and are able to demonstrate this without mistakes in controlled exercises, they can move onto the (free) production stage, where they are encouraged to use the target language as fluently and naturally as possible to replicate use outside of the classroom.
(https://sanako.com/using-the-ppp-lesson-structure-to-teach-grammar-and-vocabulary. Adaptado.)
No excerto que inicia o item 3 “Once learners have demonstrated that” a palavra em negrito pode ser substituída sem alteração de significado ou estrutura por
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Aquisição de Segunda Língua | Second Language Acquisition
Ano: 2023 Banca: VUNESP - Fundação para o Vestibular da Universidade Estadual Paulista Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Guararema
Leia o texto a seguir para responder às questões de 44 a 47.
Human beings approach any new problem with an existing set of cognitive structures and, through insight, logical thinking, and various forms of testing hypotheses, call upon whatever prior experiences they have had, and whatever cognitive structures they possess to attempt a solution. In the literature of language learning processes, three terms have commonly been singled out for explanation: transfer, interference, and overgeneralization. The three terms can be understood as several manifestations of one principle of learning - the interaction of previously learned material with a present learning event.
Transfer is a general term describing the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to a subsequent learning. Positive transfer occurs when the prior knowledge benefits the learning task - that is, when a previous item is correctly applied to the present subject matter. Negative transfer occurs when previous performance disrupts the performance of a second task. The latter can be referred to as interference.
In the literature on second language acquisition, interference is almost as frequent as the term overgeneralization, which is, of course, a particular subset of generalization - a crucially important and pervading strategy in human learning. To generalize means to infer or derive a law, rule, or conclusion, usually from the observation of particular instances.
In second language acquisition it has been common to refer to overgeneralization as a process that occurs as the second language learner acts within the target language, generalizing a particular rule or item in the second language - irrespective of the native language - beyond legitimate bounds.
(BROWN, H.Douglas. Principles of language learning and teaching. 5th ed. Longman, 2000. P 103. Adaptado)
Among examples of productions from second language learners, an example of a common type of overgeneralization is found in:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: IFMT - Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso Órgão: Instituto Federal de Mato Grosso
Read the quote and choose the CORRECT statement that completes the given sentence.
“Throughout this paper I have been arguing that we have to go further than finding ways of improving techniques to create “real life” situations in the classroom. Teachers as decision-makers and agents need to consider the identities that are being (re)constructed by their pedagogical practices and choices. Considering that those identities are being shaped anyway, it is important that teachers become aware of the effects of their actions. One of the possible identities is that of a global citizen: not someone who knows many languages but someone who deals with the conflicts inherent in communicative events made possible by a language that has acquired a global dimension” (GIMENEZ, 2007, p. 27).
According to Gimenez, globalization and the spread of English around the world have posed new challenges to language teachers because:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FUNDATEC - Fundação Universidade Empresa de Tecnologia e Ciências Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Maçambara
Instruction: answer questions 26 to 36 based on the following text. The highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.
Try these expert tips for a safer solo trip
(Available at: https://news.airbnb.com/try-these-expert-tips-for-a-safer-solo-trip/ – text especially adapted for this text).
According to the article, what should be your main concern when travelling on your own?
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FGV - Fundação Getúlio Vargas Órgão: Câmara dos Deputados
Read the Text I and answer the five questions that follow it.
Text I
Correspondence
Human genome editing: potential seeds of conflict
Recently, The Lancet published an important declaration regarding the necessity of regulating and legislating for human genome editing. We agree with their opinions that the human genome editing technology and resulting research can have both positive and negative effects on human society. The use of genome editing for research and commercial purposes has sparked debates in both biological and political realms. However, most of them have mainly focused on the effects of human genome editing on the patients themselves, and little attention has been paid to their offspring.
Several films, such as Gattaca and Gundam SEED, have addressed the conflicts that arise from human genome editing. Such conflicts not only exist within the generation who have experienced editing but are also transmitted to their offspring. For example, in these films, the offspring of people without genome editing felt a sense of unfairness regarding the inferiority of their physical (or other non-edited domains) status, whereas the offspring of people with genome editing grew up in a biased, discriminated against, and ostracized environment. They could have lived in peace with a strong and well regulated government; however, when the tenuous grip of government weakens, jealousy and resentment can lead to ruins. Although these scenes still exist in films, they might become increasingly plausible in decades to come. Using the concept of preparedness, access, countermeasures, tools, and trust, we should prepare legitimate human genome editing, establish access to deal with imminent or potential discrimination, develop countermeasures and tools for prevention and resolution of conflict, and entrust future generations with the responsibility to use them wisely.
Bing-Yan Zeng, Ping-Tao Tseng, *Chih-Sung Liang
Adapted from: www.thelancet.com, vol. 401, June 24, 2023 athttps://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2823%2901084-X
The word “seed” as used in the title is related to the act of
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Presente Perfeito | Present Perfect
Ano: 2023 Banca: FUNATEC Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de Palmeirante
Complete as lacunas corretamente:
She ____ the text frequently. (to forget)
I_______a new bicycle two months ago. (to buy)
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FGV - Fundação Getúlio Vargas Órgão: Tribunal de Contas do Estado de São Paulo
READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS 21 TO 26:
Is It Live, or Is It Deepfake?
It’s been four decades since society was in awe of the quality of recordings available from a cassette recorder tape. Today we have something new to be in awe of: deepfakes. Deepfakes include hyperrealistic videos that use artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake digital content that looks and sounds real. The word is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake.” Deepfakes are everywhere: from TV news to advertising, from national election campaigns to wars between states, and from cybercriminals’ phishing campaigns to insurance claims that fraudsters file. And deepfakes come in all shapes and sizes — videos, pictures, audio, text, and any other digital material that can be manipulated with AI. One estimate suggests that deepfake content online is growing at the rate of 400% annually.
There appear to be legitimate uses of deepfakes, such as in the medical industry to improve the diagnostic accuracy of AI algorithms in identifying periodontal disease or to help medical professionals create artificial patients (from real patient data) to safely test new diagnoses and treatments or help physicians make medical decisions. Deepfakes are also used to entertain, as seen recently on America’s Got Talent, and there may be future uses where deepfake could help teachers address the personal needs and preferences of specific students.
Unfortunately, there is also the obvious downside, where the most visible examples represent malicious and illegitimate uses. Examples already exist.
Deepfakes also involve voice phishing, also known as vishing, which has been among the most common techniques for cybercriminals. This technique involves using cloned voices over the phone to exploit the victim’s professional or personal relationships by impersonating trusted individuals. In March 2019, cybercriminals were able to use a deepfake to fool the CEO of a U.K.-based energy firm into making a US\$234,000 wire transfer. The British CEO who was victimized thought that the person speaking on the phone was the chief executive of the firm’s German parent company. The deepfake caller asked him to transfer the funds to a Hungarian supplier within an hour, emphasizing that the matter was extremely urgent. The fraudsters used AI-based software to successfully imitate the German executive’s voice. […]
What can be done to combat deepfakes? Could we create deepfake detectors? Or create laws or a code of conduct that probably would be ignored?
There are tools that can analyze the blood flow in a subject’s face and then compare it to human blood flow activity to detect a fake. Also, the European Union is working on addressing manipulative behaviors.
There are downsides to both categories of solutions, but clearly something needs to be done to build trust in this emerging and disruptive technology. The problem isn’t going away. It is only increasing.
Authors
Nit Kshetri, Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
Joanna F. DeFranco, Software Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, Malvern, PA, USA
Jeffrey Voas, NIST, USA
Adapted from: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2023/07/10154234/1O1wTOn6ynC
The aim of the last paragraph is to:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Notícias e Artigos Jornalísticos | News Articles
Ano: 2023 Banca: AMEOSC - Associação dos Municípios do Extremo Oeste de Santa Catarina Órgão: Prefeitura Municipal de São João do Oeste
O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder às questões de 1 a 5.
HOLY GRAIL I'm a dermatologist - here's how you get can get rid of forehead wrinkles without Botox and for under £10
(1º§)EACH passing day brings many moments that cause you to furrow your brow. And the more face scrunching you do, the more dreaded lines are likely to emerge __ your forehead. But before you devote time (and a decent amount of money) to fading those pesky wrinkles, it's good idea to try and figure out what's really causing your lines. If you're under 30, chances are your forehead 'wrinkles' are in fact just dehydrated skin, according to one medic.
(2º§)Dr Ivy Lee, a board-certified dermatologist practicing in southern California, US, said dehydration lines can be easily improved without splashing the cash on Botox. She told Insider that unlike wrinkles caused by repetitive muscle movement dehydration lines are finer and have a "crepe paper-like texture when the affected skin is not well hydrated." And while we may associate dehydration with drinking water, the expert said drinking more water does not have any added skin benefits. Instead, she urges young people to use topical skin treatments.
What product should I use?
(3º§)Dr Ivy said you should look for moisturisers that contain the following three ingredients:
Humectants, which attract water into the skin (eg: hyaluronic acid)
Emollients, which repair the skin barrier and soften the skin (ex: squalene and plant-derived oils).
Occlusives, which "trap moisture into the skin by creating a seal," the expert said (ex: hydrated petroleum or mineral oil).
(4º§) She recommended using CeraVe Moisturising Cream - a 177ml tube from Boots costs will set up back just £10.
Other cheap skincare products under £10
(5º§) There's no denying that luxury products contain some premium ingredients and look pretty aesthetic, but given the cost __ living crisis, affordable skincare is just as important, especially when the products work just as well. Some dermatologists have shared their favourite skincare swaps for luxury products that they say work as effectively as expensive versions.
(6º§)Vaseline vs La Mer lip balm
La Mer lip balm is touted __ many celebs as a bit of a handbag necessity. But according to Mia, nothing beats a pot of good-old Vaseline. And while La Mer balm can set you back £58 (\$75), Vaseline can be as cheap as a couple of pounds.
(7º§)The INKEY List Vitamin C serum vs SkinCeuticals
Vitamin C creams and serums can brighten your skin and, according to some studies, can reduce the signs of ageing. But these products can be expensive, because they can be tricky to make, Rebecca explained. SkinCeuticals' C E ferulic vitamin C antioxidant serum is an excellent product, she said - but it will set you back a whopping £165 (\$182). Instead, why not give the INKEY List's own vitamin C a whirl, Mia suggested, which only costs £9.99 (\$15.99).
xwwwinkkesforehead/co.uk/health/22190687/dermatologist-skincare-botox-wrinkles-forehead/
According to the text, the products that are expensive because they are hard to make would be:
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: CESPE CEBRASPE - Centro de Seleção e de Promoção de Eventos UnB Órgão: Empresa de Processamento de Dados da Previdência Social
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: <singularityhub.com> (adapted).
Concerning grammar and semantics in text CG2A2, judge the following items.
The phrase “calls into question” (in the first sentence of the last paragraph) disputes the effectiveness of BMI to assess fitness.
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FGV - Fundação Getúlio Vargas Órgão: Câmara dos Deputados
Read Text II and answer the seven questions that follow it
Text II
Boy cries Wolf
After astonishing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, many people worry that they will end up on the economic scrapheap. Global Google searches for “is my job safe?” have doubled in recent months, as people fear that they will be replaced with large language models (LLMS). Some evidence suggests that widespread disruption is coming. In a recent paper Tyna Eloundou of OpenAI and colleagues say that “around 80% of the US workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMS”. Another paper suggests that legal services, accountancy and travel agencies will face unprecedented upheaval.
Economists, however, tend to enjoy making predictions about automation more than they enjoy testing them. In the early 2010s many of them loudly predicted that robots would kill jobs by the millions, only to fall silent when employment rates across the rich world rose to all-time highs. Few of the doom-mongers have a good explanation for why countries with the highest rates of tech usage around the globe, such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea, consistently have among the lowest rates of unemployment.
Here we introduce our first attempt at tracking AI’s impact on jobs. Using American data on employment by occupation, we single out white-collar workers. These include people working in everything from back-office support and financial operations to copy-writers. White-collar roles are thought to be especially vulnerable to generative AI, which is becoming ever better at logical reasoning and creativity.
However, there is as yet little evidence of an AI hit to employment. In the spring of 2020 white-collar jobs rose as a share of the total, as many people in service occupations lost their job at the start of the covid-19 pandemic. The white-collar share is lower today, as leisure and hospitality have recovered. Yet in the past year the share of employment in professions supposedly at risk from generative AI has risen by half a percentage point.
It is, of course, early days. Few firms yet use generative-AI tools at scale, so the impact on jobs could merely be delayed. Another possibility, however, is that these new technologies will end up destroying only a small number of roles. While AI may be efficient at some tasks, it may be less good at others, such as management and working out what others need.
AI could even have a positive effect on jobs. If workers using it become more efficient, profits at their company could rise which would then allow bosses to ramp up hiring. A recent survey by Experis, an IT-recruitment firm, points to this possibility. More than half of Britain’s employers expect AI technologies to have a positive impact on their headcount over the next two years, it finds.
To see how it all shakes out, we will publish updates to this analysis every few months. But for now, a jobs apocalypse seems a way off.
From The Economist June 17th 2023, p. 71
By calling some economists “doom-mongers” in “Few of the doom-mongers have a good explanation” (2nd paragraph), the authors
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa
Assunto: Interpretação de Texto | Text Interpretation
Ano: 2023 Banca: FGV - Fundação Getúlio Vargas Órgão: Câmara dos Deputados
Read the text and answer the five questions that follow it.
Complex societies and the growth of the law
Modern societies rely upon law as the primary mechanism to control their development and manage their conflicts. Through carefully designed rights and responsibilities, institutions and procedures, law can enable humans to engage in increasingly complex social and economic activities. Therefore, law plays an important role in understanding how societies change. To explore the interplay between law and society, we need to study how both co-evolve over time. This requires a firm quantitative grasp of the changes occurring in both domains. But while quantifying societal change has been the subject of tremendous research efforts in fields such as sociology, economics, or social physics for many years, much less work has been done to quantify legal change. In fact, legal scholars have traditionally regarded the law as hardly quantifiable, and although there is no dearth of empirical legal studies, it is only recently that researchers have begun to apply data science methods to law. To date, there have been relatively few quantitative works that explicitly address legal change, and almost no scholarship exists that analyses the time-evolving outputs of the legislative and executive branches of national governments at scale. Unlocking these data sources for the interdisciplinary scientific community will be crucial for understanding how law and society interact.
Our work takes a step towards this goal. As a starting point, we hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected rules. Lawmakers create, modify, and delete legal rules to achieve particular behavioural outcomes, often in an effort to respond to perceived changes in societal needs. While earlier large-scale quantitative work focused on analysing an individual snapshot of laws enacted by national parliaments, collections of snapshots offer a window into the dynamic interaction between law and society. Such collections represent complete, time-evolving populations of statutes at the national level. Hence, no sampling is needed for their analysis, and all changes we observe are direct consequences of legislative activity. This feature makes collections of nation-level statutes particularly suitable for investigating temporal dynamics.
To preserve the intended multidimensionality of legal document collections and explore how they change over time, legislative corpora should be modelled as dynamic document networks. In particular, since legal documents are carefully organised and interlinked, their structure provides a more direct window into their content and dynamics than their language: Networks honour the deliberate design decisions made by the document authors and circumvent some of the ambiguity problems that natural language-based approaches inherently face. In this paper, we therefore develop an informed data model for legislative corpora, capturing the richness of legislative data for exploration by social physics.
Adapted from Katz, D.M., Coupette, C., Beckedorf, J. et al. Complex societies and the growth of the law. Sci Rep 10, 18737 (2020). Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73623-x
Based on the text, mark the statements below as true (T) or false (F).
( ) Diachronic studies are required for the study of the interaction between law and society.
( ) The studies of legal change and those of societal change have had an equivalent number of quantitative approaches.
( ) Legal scholars have traditionally applied data science methods to study the history of change.
The statements are, respectively,