Questões Sobre Sinônimos | Synonyms - Inglês - concurso

Questão 71

Atenção: As questões de números 56 a 60 referem-se ao
texto apresentado abaixo.

A Laptop Designed to Take a Licking and Keep on Ticking

By JOHN BIGGS

“All terrain” is not usually a designation associated with
things as delicate as hard drives and high-speed memory chips.
Dell, however, is betting that its Latitude ATG D620 − the ATG
stands for All-Terrain Grade − can change that.
The ATG D620, which Dell says is designed to military
specifications, includes a spill-resistant keyboard, heavy-duty
case and 14-inch screen, which is visible in direct sunlight. It
weighs about 6 pounds with the optical disk drive and battery
installed, and is about 2 inches thick.
The laptop comes in a metal-and-black finish with
protective coverings on its serial, video out, modem, Ethernet
and four U.S.B. ports.
Inside the hard shell is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor,
running at up to 2 gigahertz, and up to 4 gigabytes of memory.
The least expensive model ($2,499) runs at 1.6 gigahertz and
includes an 80-gigabyte drive and 512 megabytes of memory.
Dell includes a fingerprint scanner for security, while
military and other security-conscious users can enable the
laptop’s built-in Smart Card reader and other data encryption
technology.
…… it won’t survive a dunk in the deep, the ATG D620
can survive a splash of mud or a good, hard drop.
(Adapted from The New York Times, January 25, 2007)

Questão 72

Model copes with chaos to deliver relief
Computer program helps responders transport
supplies in tough conditions
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Science News, Web edition: Monday, February 21st, 2011

WASHINGTON — Getting blood or other
perishable supplies to an area that’s been struck by
an earthquake or hurricane isn’t as simple as asking
what brown can do for you. But a new model quickly
determines the best routes and means for delivering
humanitarian aid, even in situations where bridges
are out or airport tarmacs are clogged with planes.

The research, presented February 18 at the
annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, could help get supplies to
areas which have experienced natural disasters or
help prepare for efficient distribution of vaccines when
the flu hits.

Efficient supply chains have long been a goal
of manufacturers, but transport in fragile networks
— where supply, demand and delivery routes may
be in extremely rapid flux — requires a different
approach, said Anna Nagurney of the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, who presented the new work.
Rather than considering the shortest path from one
place to another to maximize profit, her system aims
for the cleanest path at minimum cost, while capturing
factors such as the perishability of the product and
the uncertainty of supply routes. ‘You don’t know
where demand is, so it’s tricky,’ said Nagurney. ‘It’s a
multicriteria decision-making problem.’
By calculating the total cost associated with
each link in a network, accounting for congestion and
incorporating penalties for time and products that are
lost, the computer model calculates the best supply
chain in situations where standard routes may be
disrupted.
‘Mathematical tools are essential to develop
formal means to predict, and to respond to, such
critical perturbations,’ said Iain Couzin of Princeton
University, who uses similar computational tools to
study collective animal behavior. ‘This is particularly
important where response must be rapid and
effective, such as during disaster scenarios … or
during epidemics or breaches of national security.
’
The work can be applied to immediate, pressing
situations, such as getting blood, food or medication
to a disaster site, or to longer-term problems such as
determining the best locations for manufacturing flu
vaccines.
.
Retrieved April 7th, 2011.

Questão 73

Is Windows 7 Worth It?
Harry McCracken, PC World
Monday, October 19, 2009 10:00 AM PDT

          Reading about a new operating system can tell you only  so much about it: After all, Windows Vista had far more features  than XP, [CONJUNCTION] fell far short of it in the eyes of many  users. To judge an OS accurately, you have to live with it. Over  the past ten months, I’ve spent a substantial percentage of my  computing life in Windows 7, starting with a preliminary version  and culminating in recent weeks with the final Release to  Manufacturing edition. I’ve run it on systems ranging from an  underpowered Asus EeePC 1000HE netbook to a potent HP  TouchSmart all-in-one. And I’ve used it to do real work, not lab  routines. Usually, I’ve run the OS in multiboot configurations with  Windows Vista and/or XP, so I’ve had a choice each time I turned the computer on: [MODAL] I opt for Windows 7 or an
older version of the OS? The call has been easy to make, because Win 7 is so pleasant to use.
          So why wouldn’t you want to run this operating system?  Concern over its performance is one logical reason, especially  since early versions of Windows Vista managed to turn PCs that  ran XP with ease into lethargic underperformers. The PC World  Test Center’s speed benchmarks on five test PCs showed  Windows 7 to be faster than Vista, but only by a little; I’ve found  it to be reasonably quick on every computer I’ve used it on – even the Asus netbook, once I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM. (Our  lab tried Win 7 on a Lenovo S10 netbook with 1GB of RAM and  found it to be a shade slower than XP; for details see “Windows 7 Performance Tests.”).
           Here’s a rule of thumb that errs on the side of caution: If  your PC’s specs qualify it to run Vista, get Windows 7; if they  don’t, avoid it. Microsoft’s official hardware configuration  requirements for Windows 7 are nearly identical to those it  recommends for Windows Vista: a 1-GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM,
16GB of free disk space, and a DirectX 9-compatible graphics  device with a WDDM 1.0 or higher driver. That’s for the 32-bit  version of Windows 7; the 64-bit version of the OS requires a  64-bit CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk space.
           Fear of incompatible hardware and software is another  understandable reason to be wary of Windows 7. One  unfortunate law of operating-system upgrades – which applies  equally to Macs and to Windows PCs – is that they will break  some systems and applications, especially at first.  
           Under the hood, Windows 7 isn’t radically different from  Vista. That’s a plus, since it should greatly reduce the volume of  difficulties relating to drivers and apps compared to Vista’s  bumpy rollout. I have performed a half-dozen Windows 7  upgrades, and most of them went off without a hitch. The
gnarliest problem arose when I had to track down a graphics  driver for Dell’s XPS M1330 laptop on my own – Windows 7  installed a generic VGA driver that couldn’t run the Aero user  interface, and as a result failed to support new Windows 7  features such as thumbnail views in the Taskbar.
           The best way to reduce your odds of running into a  showstopping problem with Windows 7 is to bide your time.  When the new operating system arrives on October 22, sit back  and let the earliest adopters discover the worst snafus. Within a few weeks, Microsoft and other software and hardware   companies will have fixed most of them, and your chances of a  happy migration to Win 7 will be much higher. If you want to be really conservative, hold off on moving to Win 7 until you’re  ready to buy a PC that’s designed to run it well.
           Waiting a bit before making the leap makes sense;  waiting forever does not. Microsoft took far too long to come up  with a satisfactory replacement for Windows XP. But whether  you choose to install Windows 7 on your current systems or get  it on the next new PC you buy, you’ll find that it’s the  unassuming, thoroughly practical upgrade you’ve been waiting  for ? flaws and all.

                                                 (Adapted                    from  http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_revi…)

The meaning of to bide in to bide your time is:

Questão 74

GadgetDesigners Push the Limits of Size, Safety
By Brian X. Chen, August 28, 2008

Just as small, fast-moving mammals replaced lumbering
dinosaurs, pocketable gadgets are evolving to fill niches that
larger, deskbound computers can’t reach. But as they shrink,
these gadgets are faced with problems mammals face, too,
such as efficiently dissipating heat.

The recent example of Apple’s first-generation iPod nanos
causing fires in Japan raises the question of whether
increasingly innovative product designs are impinging on
safety. The nano incident illustrates how risk can increase as
devices decrease in size, says Roger Kay, an analyst at
EndpointTechnologies.

“As [gadgets] get smaller, the tradeoffs become more difficult,
the balance becomes more critical and there’s less room for
error,” Kay said. “I’m not surprised it’s happening to the nano
because that’s the small one. You’re asking it to do a lot in a
very, very small package and that’s pushing the envelope.”

There’s no question that industrial designers’ jobs have
become much more difficult as the industry demands ever
more powerful and smaller gadgets. With paper-thin
subnotebooks, ultrasmall MP3 players, and pinkie finger-
sized Bluetooth headsets becoming increasingly popular, it’s
questionable where exactly designers draw the line between
innovation and safety.

The expression such as in the last line of the first paragraph could be changed by ____ and its meaning would not altered.

Questão 75

Read text II and answer questions 37 to 40.

TEXT II

If you think that there’s something oddly familiar about
descriptions of social media, it may be that you recall some of
the discussions in the 1990s about what the web would
become. And many of its emerging manifestations are close to
the idealistic imaginings from that time. A good way to think
about social media is that all of this is actually just about being
human beings. Sharing ideas, cooperating and collaborating to
create art, thinking and commerce, vigorous debate and
discourse, finding people who might be good friends, allies and
lovers – it’s what our species has built several civilisations on.
That’s why it is spreading so quickly, not because it’s great
shiny, whizzy new technology, but because it lets us be
ourselves – only more so. And it is in the “more so” that the
power of this revolution lies. People can find information,
inspiration, like-minded people, communities and collaborators
faster than ever before. New ideas, services, business models
and technologies emerge and evolve at dizzying speed in social
media.

(http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads}
/eBooks/What_is_social_media_Nov_2007.pdf

The underlined expression in “evolve at dizzying speed” can be replaced by

Questão 76

Read text II and answer questions 37 to 40.

TEXT II

If you think that there’s something oddly familiar about
descriptions of social media, it may be that you recall some of
the discussions in the 1990s about what the web would
become. And many of its emerging manifestations are close to
the idealistic imaginings from that time. A good way to think
about social media is that all of this is actually just about being
human beings. Sharing ideas, cooperating and collaborating to
create art, thinking and commerce, vigorous debate and
discourse, finding people who might be good friends, allies and
lovers – it’s what our species has built several civilisations on.
That’s why it is spreading so quickly, not because it’s great
shiny, whizzy new technology, but because it lets us be
ourselves – only more so. And it is in the “more so” that the
power of this revolution lies. People can find information,
inspiration, like-minded people, communities and collaborators
faster than ever before. New ideas, services, business models
and technologies emerge and evolve at dizzying speed in social
media.

(http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads}
/eBooks/What_is_social_media_Nov_2007.pdf

The expression “like-minded people” means people who

Questão 77

‘CityVille’ now bigger on Facebook than ‘FarmVille’
(Mashable) — Facebook game developer Zynga has proved once
again that it knows exactly what it needs to do to keep millions of
Facebook users happy and occupied.
In less than a month, its latest game “CityVille”___ ______
(become) the most popular application on Facebook, surpassing
Zynga’s previous hit “FarmVille” in all areas.
According to AppData, “CityVille” now has 16.8 million daily
active users, compared to “FarmVille’s” 16.4 million. Looking at
monthly active users, “CityVille” is also ahead with 61.7 million
users, while “FarmVille” trails behind with 56.8 million users.
Zynga’s “FrontierVille” and “Texas HoldEm Poker” also round out
the top five: put those four apps together (we’ll disregard the fact
that many of those users overlap for a second) and you have a
very impressive number: 184 million active users across four
games.
The only non-Zynga app in the top five list is “Phrases,” _____ at
one point threatened to take the top place, but is now
overshadowed by both “CityVille” and “FarmVille.”
“CityVille’s” future success wasn’t hard to predict after an
amazingly good start at the beginning of December, but it’s still
impressive to see Zynga amassing tens of millions of users in a
matter of days, proving that all that venture capital that went into
the company isn’t there by accident.
Fonte :cnn.com

In the sentence: “Zynga’s “FrontierVille” and “Texas HoldEm Poker” also round out the top five: put those four apps together…”, round out means the same
as:

Questão 78

1 Climate change is a defining issue of our time, a
challenge that already affects and will increasingly impact all
nations, including some whose very survival is at risk. The
4 complexity of the problem is intrinsically linked with
overarching societal issues, such as poverty reduction,
economic development and population growth
7 After a decade of work on integrating Earth- and
satellite-based observing networks, thereby establishing new
observation methods that have made a tremendous impact on
10 the way climate change and physical oceanic variability is
measured, scientists are once again exploring uncharted waters
and looking to set a new course for the future at the
13 OceanObs’09 Conference in Venice, Italy on September 21-25.
Ten years ago — at the first conference for a comprehensive
ocean observing system — scientists envisioned measuring
16 satellite altimetry of sea-surface height with tide gauges and
buoy measurements in order to forecast ocean currents. They
brainstormed methods for monitoring changes in temperature
19 and salinity in the Southern Ocean and the South Atlantic
which had never been systematically monitored. They also
drew up a plan for implementing a global array of temperature
22 and salinity floats that would profile the water column down to
a depth of 2,000 meters in real time. The initiatives launched
at that conference a decade ago have since provided data that
25 fed the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
assessments of human influence on climate change, improved
seasonal forecasts crucial for agriculture, hydropower, and
28 storm prediction and provided information invaluable to the
lives and safety of mariners.
Internet: (adapted).

Questão 79

1 Climate change is a defining issue of our time, a
challenge that already affects and will increasingly impact all
nations, including some whose very survival is at risk. The
4 complexity of the problem is intrinsically linked with
overarching societal issues, such as poverty reduction,
economic development and population growth
7 After a decade of work on integrating Earth- and
satellite-based observing networks, thereby establishing new
observation methods that have made a tremendous impact on
10 the way climate change and physical oceanic variability is
measured, scientists are once again exploring uncharted waters
and looking to set a new course for the future at the
13 OceanObs’09 Conference in Venice, Italy on September 21-25.
Ten years ago — at the first conference for a comprehensive
ocean observing system — scientists envisioned measuring
16 satellite altimetry of sea-surface height with tide gauges and
buoy measurements in order to forecast ocean currents. They
brainstormed methods for monitoring changes in temperature
19 and salinity in the Southern Ocean and the South Atlantic
which had never been systematically monitored. They also
drew up a plan for implementing a global array of temperature
22 and salinity floats that would profile the water column down to
a depth of 2,000 meters in real time. The initiatives launched
at that conference a decade ago have since provided data that
25 fed the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
assessments of human influence on climate change, improved
seasonal forecasts crucial for agriculture, hydropower, and
28 storm prediction and provided information invaluable to the
lives and safety of mariners.
Internet: (adapted).

Questão 80

1 As the evidence and knowledge of the physical effects
of climate change continue to grow, the world is starting to
dissect how those physical changes (e.g. water scarcity, sea-
4 level rise, increased temperatures), both current and predicted,
will intersect with society and economies and the potentially
significant environmental and human impacts that will result.
7 Of emerging interest are the potential impacts of climate
change on the enjoyment of human rights and wellbeing.
Weather and environmental degradation have, as one of
10 multiple stressors, threatened lives and livelihoods throughout
history, but what makes this interaction more relevant today is
the growing evidence that greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions
13 have contributed and will continue to contribute to long-term
or permanent changes to our ecosystems and landscapes and
will increase the frequency and severity of extreme events. This
16 amplifies existing social risks and vulnerabilities and will
therefore increase the pressures faced by many disadvantaged
individuals and populations in Canada and abroad.
19 On January 15 2009, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) released a study
on climate change and human rights in response to UN
22 Resolution 7/23 in which signatories expressed concern “that
climate change poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to people and communities around the world and has implications
25 for the full enjoyment of human rights.”
Internet: (adapted)