Questões Sobre Sinônimos | Synonyms - Inglês - concurso

Questão 31

Michael Jackson went 60 days without real sleep

Michael Jackson died while preparing to set a world record for the most successful concert run ever, but he unknowingly set another record that led to his death.

Jackson may be the only human ever to go two months without REM – Rapid Eye Movement – sleep, which is vital to keep the brain and body alive. The 60 nights of propofol infusions Dr. Conrad Murray said he gave Jackson to treat his insomnia is something a sleep expert says no one had ever undergone.

“The symptoms that Mr. Jackson was exhibiting were consistent with what someone might expect to see of someone suffering from total sleep deprivation over a chronic period,” Dr. Charles Czeisler, a Harvard Medical School sleep expert, testified Friday at the wrongful-death trial of concert promoter AEG Live, company that hired Dr. Conrad Murray as Jackson’s personal physician.
Propofol disrupts the normal sleep cycle and offers no REM sleep, yet it leaves a patient feeling refreshed as if they had experienced genuine sleep, according to Czeisler.
If the singer had not died on June 25, 2009, of an overdose of the surgical anesthetic, the lack of REM sleep may have soon taken his life anyway, according Czeisler’s testimony Friday.

Na frase do texto “Propofol disrupts the normal sleep cycle and offers no REM sleep, yet it leaves a patient feeling refreshed”, a expressão “yet” poderia ser substituída por, EXCETO:

Questão 32

In Higher Education, a Focus on Technology

By STEVE LOHR
The education gap facing the nation’s work force is evident in the numbers. Most new jobs will require more than a high school education, yet fewer than half of Americans under 30 have a (2) postsecondary degree of any kind. Recent state budget cuts, education experts agree, promise to make closing that gap even more difcult. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonproft education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools. An initial $20 million round of money, from the Gates Foundation, will be for postsecondary online courses, particularly ones tailored for community colleges and low-income young people. Another round of grants, for high school programs, is scheduled for next year.

Just how efective technology can be in improving education – by making students more efective, more engaged learners – is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring. If technology is well designed, experts say, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student- teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fne-tuning lessons. The potential benefts of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about ffth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is (3) ludicrous.”

(1)
higher education: educação superior.
(2)
postsecondary: termo que se refere aos cursos feitos após o high school ou, no modelo educacional brasileiro, o Ensino Médio.
(3)
ludicrous: ridícula, absurda.

No mesmo trecho do terceiro parágrafo – (…) particularly ones tailored for community colleges and low-income young people. – a palavra tailored pode ser substituída, sem alteração do sentido do texto, por

Questão 33

Brazil’s Average Unemployment Rate Falls to Record Low in 2012

By Dow Jones Business News

January 31, 2013

            Brazil’s unemployment rate for 2012 fell to 5.5%, down from the previous record low of 6.0% recorded last year, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, or IBGE, said Thursday. In December, unemployment fell to 4.6% compared with 4.9% in November, besting the previous record monthly low of 4.7% registered in December 2011, the IBGE said
            The 2012 average unemployment rate was in line with the 5.5% median estimate of economists polled by the local Estado news agency. Analysts had also pegged December’s unemployment rate at 4.4%.
            Brazil’s unemployment rate remains at historically low levels despite sluggish economic activity. Salaries have also been on the upswing in an ominous sign for inflation – a key area of concern for the Brazilian Central Bank after a series of interest rate cuts brought local interest rates to record lows last year. Inflation ended 2012 at 5.84%.
            The average monthly Brazilian salary retreated slightly to 1,805.00 Brazilian reais ($908.45) in December, down from the record high BRL1,809.60 registered in November, the IBGE said. Wages trended higher in 2012 as employee groups called on Brazilian companies and the government to increase wages and benefits to counter higher local prices. Companies were also forced to pay more to hire and retain workers because of the country’s low unemployment.
The IBGE measures unemployment in six of Brazil’s largest metropolitan areas, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Porto Alegre. Brazil’s unemployment rate, however, is not fully comparable to jobless rates in developed countries as a large portion of the population is either underemployed or works informally without paying taxes. In addition, workers not actively seeking a job in the month before the survey don’t count as unemployed under the IBGE’s methodology. The survey also doesn’t take into account farm workers.

                                    (www.nasdaq.com. Adaptado)

No trecho do ultimo parágrafo – In addition, workers not actively seeking a job – a expressão in addition pode ser substituída, sem alteração de sentido, por

Questão 34

Text 1: Software That Fixes Itself

The word ‘resilient’ in “making software significantly more resilient against failure or attack” (Paragraph 1) could best be replaced by :

Questão 35

Empirically Based Leadership

A significant area of interest within the US Army empirical literature on leadership is emotional intelligence (EI), which in recent years has been the focus of considerable attention in relationship to leadership efficacy. Emotional intelligence involves an awareness of one’s own emotions as well as the ability to control them, social awareness of others and their emotions, and the capacity to understand and manage relationship and social networks.

In understanding others’ emotions, an important contributing factor to the success of the more effective military officers is their ability to empathize with their subordinates. In discussing empathy, FM (Field Manual) 6-22 defines it as “the ability to see something from another person’s point of view, to identify with and enter into another person’s feelings and emotions”. Empathy is not typically a quality that most soldiers would readily identify as an essential characteristic to effective leadership or necessary to producing positive organizational outcomes, but it is an important quality for competent leadership, especially as it relates to EI.

In the sentence “…an awareness of one’s own emotions as well as the ability to control them…”, the expression as well as has the same meaning as

Questão 36

Escolha a única alternativa correta, dentre as opções apresentadas, que responde ou completa cada questão.

I wouldn’t call myself a social butterfly
And there’s not much that separates me from the other guy
But when I log in I begin to live

There’s an online world where I am king
Of a little website dedicated to me
With pictures of me and a list of my friends
And an unofficial record of the groups that I’m in

Before the internet, friendship was so tough
You actually had to be in people’s presence and stuff
Who would have thought that with a point and a click
I could know that Hope Floats is your favorite flick

Facebook
I’m hooked on Facebook
I used to meet girls hanging out at the mall
Now I just wait for them to write on my wall

Oh! Link’s status changed, it says he’s playing the recorder…

How do you know this person?
Did you hook up with this person?
Do you need to request confirmation?
Or did you just think they looked cute…
From their picture on Facebook?

If the internet crashed all across the land
Or my Facebook account was deleted by the man
I’d carry around a picture of my face
And a summary of me typed out on a page

In the sentence “Before the internet, friendship was so tough”, the word tough can be replaced by

Questão 37

LIFE COACHING – YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS?

Derek Workman

These days it seems that there’s always someone there to pick you up, help you out and give your life a new start.
You can find someone to choose your clothes for you, or sort out your wardrobe, if you already have enough; there’s someone to arrange your dinner parties and someone else who will look after your diary, or if life just seems to be too much trouble to do anything at all, you can find a psychotherapist to help you deal with your problems.
Fine as it is to have all this help at hand, if we look closely at ourselves, we can begin to see that we don’t actually need all these people to look after us. To help us do this is the role of the Life Coach – someone who won’t judge us, who won’t tell us what to do and is there to support us in those nervous life decisions that we all have to make.
Mike Lewis was a self-confessed computer geek in his hometown of Southampton, England, but rose high up the corporate ladder in California. He now lives in a small coastal town in Spain where he acts as a Life Coach to clients in Europe, America, India and Australia, chatting with them on a regular basis by telephone. But why should we need anybody to help us along?
A life coach is basically a support system for people who want to make some change in their life. The sig- nificant thing about personal development is this: there’s relatively few people that I’ve ever met that don’t want to get on in life, but it’s hard to get on if you try and find all this stimulus from the outside. The difference between coaching and other forms of personal development is primarily this: with life coaching, nobody tells you what to do, nobody tells you who you should be, nobody tries to change you ‘cause we’re all perfect as we are! What a life coach does is encourage you to find the answers to all life’s problems from within, not from without.

Fonte: Revista Speak UP, edição 201, fev. 2004.

In “[…] we don’t actually need all these people to look after us.”, actually MEANS:

Questão 38

House Approves Higher Debt Limit Without Condition
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER
Feb. 11, 2014

WASHINGTON – Ending three years of brinkmanship in which the threat of a devastating default on the nation’s debt was used to wring conservative concessions from President Obama, the House on Tuesday voted to raise the government’s borrowing limit until March 2015, without any conditions.
The vote – 221 to 201 – relied almost entirely on Democrats in the Republican-controlled House to carry the measure and represented the first debt ceiling increase since 2009 that was not attached to other legislation. Only 28 Republicans voted yes, and only two Democrats voted no.
Simply by holding the vote, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio effectively ended a three-year Tea Party-inspired era of budget showdowns that had raised the threat of default and government shutdowns, rattled economic confidence and brought serious scrutiny from other nations questioning Washington’s ability to govern. In the process, though, Mr. Boehner also set off a series of reprisals from fellow Republican congressmen and outside groups that showcased the party’s deep internal divisions.
During the October 2013 government shutdown, The Times’s David Leonhardt explained the debt limit and how a failure to raise it could have affected the economy both at home and abroad.
“He gave the president exactly what he wanted, which is exactly what the Republican Party said we did not want,” said a Republican representative, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who last year unsuccessfully tried to rally enough support to derail Mr. Boehner’s re-election as speaker. “It’s going to really demoralize the base.”
The vote was a victory for President Obama, Democrats and those Senate Republicans who have argued that spending money for previously incurred obligations was essential for the financial standing of the federal government. “Tonight’s vote is a positive step in moving away from the political brinkmanship that’s a needless drag on our economy,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
“A clean debt ceiling is a complete capitulation on the speaker’s part and demonstrates that he has lost the ability to lead the House of Representatives, let alone his own party,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. “It is time for him to go.”
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, commended the speaker and promised to pass the bill as soon as possible. “We’re happy to see the House is legislating the way they should have legislated for a long time,” he said.

(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/us/politics/ boehner-to-bring-debt-ceiling-to-vote-without-policy- attachments. html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_2014021 2&_r=0)

As used in the text, and without any change in meaning, though could be replaced by

Questão 39

1                     Public health is what we, as a society, do collectively
        to assure the conditions for people to be healthy. This requires
        that continuing and emerging threats to the health of the public
4      be successfully countered. These threats include immediate
        crises, such as the AIDS epidemic; enduring problems, such as
        injuries and chronic illnesses; and growing challenges, such as
7      the aging of the populations and the toxic by-products of a
        modern economy, transmitted through air, water, soil, or food.
        These and many other problems raise in common the need to
10    protect the nation’s health through effective, organized, and
        sustained efforts led by the public sector.

              Internet: <www.publichealthpolicy.org> (adapted).

Based on the text above, judge the following items.

In the text, “enduring problems” (l.5) are the sorts of problems that take a very long time to be solved.

Questão 40

1               The difficulty for health policy makers the world overis
         this: it is simply not possible to promote healthier lifestyles
         through presidential decree or through being overprotective
4       towards people and the way they choose to live. Recent history
         has proved that one-size-fits-all solutions are no good when
         public health challenges vary from one area of the country to
7       the next. But we cannot sit back while, in spite of all this, so
        many people are suffering such severe lifestyle-driven ill health
       and such acute health inequalities.
   
        Internet: <www.gov.uk> (adapted).

In the text above,

the expression “the world over” (l.1) is synonymous with in some parts of the world.