Questõesde USP sobre Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension

      What time isit? Thatsimple question probably is asked more often today than ever. In our clock‐studded, cell‐phone society, the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can blissfully partition our daysinto eversmaller incrementsfor ever more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always know it is 7:03 P.M.

      Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now” dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. Bound by the speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can never catch up.

      Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us. Relativity dictates that, like a strange syrup, time flows slower on moving trains than in the stations and faster in the mountains than in the valleys. The time for our wristwatch or digital screen is not exactly the same as the time for our head.  

      Our intuitions are deeply paradoxical. Time heals all wounds, but it is also the great destroyer. Time is relative but also relentless. There is time for every purpose under heaven, but there is never enough.  

                                    Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

      What time isit? Thatsimple question probably is asked more often today than ever. In our clock‐studded, cell‐phone society, the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can blissfully partition our daysinto eversmaller incrementsfor ever more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always know it is 7:03 P.M.

      Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now” dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. Bound by the speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can never catch up.

      Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us. Relativity dictates that, like a strange syrup, time flows slower on moving trains than in the stations and faster in the mountains than in the valleys. The time for our wristwatch or digital screen is not exactly the same as the time for our head.  

      Our intuitions are deeply paradoxical. Time heals all wounds, but it is also the great destroyer. Time is relative but also relentless. There is time for every purpose under heaven, but there is never enough.  

                                    Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

      What time isit? Thatsimple question probably is asked more often today than ever. In our clock‐studded, cell‐phone society, the answer is never more than a glance away, and so we can blissfully partition our daysinto eversmaller incrementsfor ever more tightly scheduled tasks, confident that we will always know it is 7:03 P.M.

      Modern scientific revelations about time, however, make the question endlessly frustrating. If we seek a precise knowledge of the time, the elusive infinitesimal of “now” dissolves into a scattering flock of nanoseconds. Bound by the speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can never catch up.

      Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us. Relativity dictates that, like a strange syrup, time flows slower on moving trains than in the stations and faster in the mountains than in the valleys. The time for our wristwatch or digital screen is not exactly the same as the time for our head.  

      Our intuitions are deeply paradoxical. Time heals all wounds, but it is also the great destroyer. Time is relative but also relentless. There is time for every purpose under heaven, but there is never enough.  

                                    Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

      Algorithms are everywhere. They play the stockmarket, decide whether you can have a mortgage and may one day drive your car for you. They search the internet when commanded, stick carefully chosen advertisements into the sites you visit and decide what prices to show you in online shops. (…) But what exactly are algorithms, and what makes them so powerful?

      An algorithm is, essentially, a brainless way of doing clever things. It is a set of precise steps that need no great mental effort to follow but which, if obeyed exactly and mechanically, will lead to some desirable outcome. Long division and column addition are examples that everyone is familiar with — if you follow the procedure, you are guaranteed to get the right answer. So is the strategy, rediscovered thousands of times every year by schoolchildren bored with learning mathematical algorithms, for playing a perfect game of noughts and crosses. The brainlessness is key: each step should be as simple and as free from ambiguity as possible. Cooking recipes and driving directions are algorithms of a sort. But instructions like “stew the meat until tender” or “it’s a few miles down the road” are too vague to follow without at least some interpretation.

      (…)

                                                                                                          The Economist, August 30, 2017.

      It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

      Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away.

      Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

      There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

      To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

      Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

                                                         Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado. 

      Algorithms are everywhere. They play the stockmarket, decide whether you can have a mortgage and may one day drive your car for you. They search the internet when commanded, stick carefully chosen advertisements into the sites you visit and decide what prices to show you in online shops. (…) But what exactly are algorithms, and what makes them so powerful?

      An algorithm is, essentially, a brainless way of doing clever things. It is a set of precise steps that need no great mental effort to follow but which, if obeyed exactly and mechanically, will lead to some desirable outcome. Long division and column addition are examples that everyone is familiar with — if you follow the procedure, you are guaranteed to get the right answer. So is the strategy, rediscovered thousands of times every year by schoolchildren bored with learning mathematical algorithms, for playing a perfect game of noughts and crosses. The brainlessness is key: each step should be as simple and as free from ambiguity as possible. Cooking recipes and driving directions are algorithms of a sort. But instructions like “stew the meat until tender” or “it’s a few miles down the road” are too vague to follow without at least some interpretation.

      (…)

                                                                                                          The Economist, August 30, 2017.

      It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

      Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away.

      Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

      There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

      To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

      Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

                                                         Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado. 

      It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

      Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away.

      Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

      There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

      To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

      Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

                                                         Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado. 

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    A study carried out by Lauren Sherman of the University of California and her colleagues investigated how use of the “like” button in social media affects the brains of teenagers lying in body scanners.

    Thirty-two teens who had Instagram accounts were asked to lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This let Dr. Sherman monitor their brain activity while they were perusing both their own Instagram photos and photos that they were told had been added by other teenagers in the experiment. In reality, Dr. Sherman had collected all the other photos, which included neutral images of food and friends as well as many depicting risky behaviours like drinking, smoking and drug use, from other peoples’ Instagram accounts. The researchers told participants they were viewing photographs that 50 other teenagers had already seen and endorsed with a “like” in the laboratory.

    The participants were more likely themselves to “like” photos already depicted as having been “liked” a lot than they were photos depicted with fewer previous “likes”. When she looked at the fMRI results, Dr. Sherman found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, a hub of reward circuitry in the brain, increased with the number of “likes” that a photo had.

The Economist, June 13, 2016. Adaptado.

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    A study carried out by Lauren Sherman of the University of California and her colleagues investigated how use of the “like” button in social media affects the brains of teenagers lying in body scanners.

    Thirty-two teens who had Instagram accounts were asked to lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This let Dr. Sherman monitor their brain activity while they were perusing both their own Instagram photos and photos that they were told had been added by other teenagers in the experiment. In reality, Dr. Sherman had collected all the other photos, which included neutral images of food and friends as well as many depicting risky behaviours like drinking, smoking and drug use, from other peoples’ Instagram accounts. The researchers told participants they were viewing photographs that 50 other teenagers had already seen and endorsed with a “like” in the laboratory.

    The participants were more likely themselves to “like” photos already depicted as having been “liked” a lot than they were photos depicted with fewer previous “likes”. When she looked at the fMRI results, Dr. Sherman found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, a hub of reward circuitry in the brain, increased with the number of “likes” that a photo had.

The Economist, June 13, 2016. Adaptado.

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    Plants not only remember when you touch them, but they can also make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems.

    Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.

    In a set of experiments, Dr. Shemesh, from Tel✄Hai College in Israel, and Alex Kacelnik, from Oxford University, grew pea plants and split their roots between two pots. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one, the levels were constant; in the other, they varied over time. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average nutrients in both pots would be equally high or low, and asked: Which pot would a plant prefer?

    When nutrient levels were low, the plants laid more roots in the unpredictable pot. But when nutrients were abundant, they chose the one that always had the same amount.

The New York Times, June 30, 2016. Adaptado.

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    Plants not only remember when you touch them, but they can also make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems.

    Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.

    In a set of experiments, Dr. Shemesh, from Tel✄Hai College in Israel, and Alex Kacelnik, from Oxford University, grew pea plants and split their roots between two pots. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one, the levels were constant; in the other, they varied over time. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average nutrients in both pots would be equally high or low, and asked: Which pot would a plant prefer?

    When nutrient levels were low, the plants laid more roots in the unpredictable pot. But when nutrients were abundant, they chose the one that always had the same amount.

The New York Times, June 30, 2016. Adaptado.

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    Plants not only remember when you touch them, but they can also make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems.

    Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.

    In a set of experiments, Dr. Shemesh, from Tel✄Hai College in Israel, and Alex Kacelnik, from Oxford University, grew pea plants and split their roots between two pots. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one, the levels were constant; in the other, they varied over time. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average nutrients in both pots would be equally high or low, and asked: Which pot would a plant prefer?

    When nutrient levels were low, the plants laid more roots in the unpredictable pot. But when nutrients were abundant, they chose the one that always had the same amount.

The New York Times, June 30, 2016. Adaptado.

Working for on demand startups like Uber and TaskRabbit is supposed to offer flexible hours and higher wages, but many workers have found the pay lower and the hours less flexible than they expected. Even more surprising: 8 percent of those chauffeuring passengers and 16 percent of those making deliveries said they lack personal autoinsurance.

Those are among the findings from a survey about the work life of independent contractors for on-demand startups, a booming sector of the tech industry, being released Wednesday.

"We want to shed light on the industry as a whole," said Isaac Madan, a Stanford master's candidate in bioinformatics who worked with two other Stanford students and a recent alumnus on the survey of 1,330 workers. "People need to understand how this space will change and evolve and help the economy."

On-demand, often called the sharing economy, refers to companies that let users summon workers via smartphone apps to handle all manner of services: rides, cleaning, chores, deliveries, car parking, waiting in lines. Almost uniformly, those workers are independent contractors rather than salaried employees.

That status is the main point of contention in a recent rash of lawsuits in which workers are filing for employee status. While the survey did not directly ask

contractors if they would prefer to be employees, it found that their top workplace desires were to have paid health insurance, retirement benefits and paid time off for holidays, vacation and sick days - all perks of full time workers. Respondents also expressed interest in having more chances for advancement, education sponsorship, disability insurance and human relations support. Because respondents were recruited rather than randomly selected, the survey does not claim to be representational but a conclusion one may come to is that flexibility ofnew jobs comes with a cost. Not all workers are prepared for that!

SFChronicle.com and SFGate.com, May 20, 2015. Adaptado

Working for on demand startups like Uber and TaskRabbit is supposed to offer flexible hours and higher wages, but many workers have found the pay lower and the hours less flexible than they expected. Even more surprising: 8 percent of those chauffeuring passengers and 16 percent of those making deliveries said they lack personal autoinsurance.

Those are among the findings from a survey about the work life of independent contractors for on-demand startups, a booming sector of the tech industry, being released Wednesday.

"We want to shed light on the industry as a whole," said Isaac Madan, a Stanford master's candidate in bioinformatics who worked with two other Stanford students and a recent alumnus on the survey of 1,330 workers. "People need to understand how this space will change and evolve and help the economy."

On-demand, often called the sharing economy, refers to companies that let users summon workers via smartphone apps to handle all manner of services: rides, cleaning, chores, deliveries, car parking, waiting in lines. Almost uniformly, those workers are independent contractors rather than salaried employees.

That status is the main point of contention in a recent rash of lawsuits in which workers are filing for employee status. While the survey did not directly ask

contractors if they would prefer to be employees, it found that their top workplace desires were to have paid health insurance, retirement benefits and paid time off for holidays, vacation and sick days - all perks of full time workers. Respondents also expressed interest in having more chances for advancement, education sponsorship, disability insurance and human relations support. Because respondents were recruited rather than randomly selected, the survey does not claim to be representational but a conclusion one may come to is that flexibility ofnew jobs comes with a cost. Not all workers are prepared for that!

SFChronicle.com and SFGate.com, May 20, 2015. Adaptado