Questões de Concurso – Aprova Concursos

  Using your phone while on the toilet poses significant health risks, as warned by an expert, Dr. Sethi. Despite being a common habit, mindlessly scrolling or using your phone in the bathroom can lead to severe consequences. Dr. Sethi, a Harvard-trained stomach doctor, highlights that this practice, particularly during bowel movements, causes extended sitting that strains the rectum and anus, potentially resulting in hemorrhoids, anal fissures, and rectal prolapse.

      Furthermore, using phones in the bathroom makes them a breeding ground for bacteria, surpassing the hygiene levels of a public toilet seat. Dr. Sethi emphasizes the importance of avoiding phone usage while on the toilet or, if unavoidable, suggests disinfecting the phone afterward. Research spanning over a decade has consistently shown that phones harbor a significant amount of germs, including fecal matter.

      Despite these health warnings, over 65% of adults take their phones into the bathroom, with Spain having the highest usage rates (nearly 80%) and Germany the lowest (just under 55%). Interestingly, younger age groups, particularly those aged 26-41 and 18-25, are most likely to engage in this unhygienic behavior. Apart from health concerns, there’s the practical risk of dropping the phone into the toilet, with a fifth of respondents in the United States admitting to this mishap.

Internet: <www.mirror.co.uk> (adapted). 

Based on the previous text, judge the following items.

Text I

Shock of the old: Believe it or not, battery-powered vehicles 
have been around since Victorian times.

     The history of the electric car is surprisingly enraging. If you 
imagine early electric vehicles at all (full disclosure: I didn’t until 
recently), it will probably be as the quixotic and possibly dangerous 
dream of a few eccentrics, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, when 
domestic electrification became widespread. It’s easy to imagine 
some stiff-collared proto-Musk getting bored of hunting and 
affairs, eyeing his newly installed electric lights speculatively, then 
wreaking untold havoc and mass electrocutions. The reality is 
entirely different.
      By 1900, a third of all cars on the road in the US were electric; 
we’re looking at the history of a cruelly missed opportunity, and it 
started astonishingly early. The Scottish engineer Robert Anderson 
had a go at an electric car of sorts way back in the 1830s, though 
his invention was somewhat stymied by the fact rechargeable 
batteries were not invented until 1859, making his crude carriage 
something of a one-trick pony (and far less useful than an actual 
pony).
      It’s debatable whether or not Scotland was ready for this brave 
new world anyway: in 1842, Robert Davidson (another Scot, who 
had, a few years earlier, also tried his hand at an electric vehicle) 
saw his electric locomotive Galvani “broken by some malicious 
hands almost beyond repair” in Perth. The contemporary 
consensus was that it was attacked by railway workers fearful for 
their jobs.
     Despite this unpromising start, electric vehicles had entered 
widespread commercial circulation by the start of the 20th 
century, particularly in the US. Electric cabs crisscrossed 
Manhattan, 1897’s bestselling US car was electric and, when he 
was shot in 1901, President McKinley was taken to hospital in an 
electric ambulance. London had Walter Bersey’s electric taxis, and 
Berlin’s fire engines went electric in 1908; the future looked bright, 
clean and silent.
      By the 1930s, however, the tide had definitively turned against 
electric, cursed by range limitations and impractical charging times 
while petrol gained the upper hand thanks partly – and ironically –
to the electric starter motor. The Horseless Age magazine, which 
vehemently backed the petrol non-horse, would have been 
delighted. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the late 
1960s, when the US Congress passed a bill promoting electrical 
vehicle development, but nothing much actually happened until 
the Nissan Leaf sparked interest in 2009. Electric still isn’t quite 
there yet, battling infrastructure and battery problems that might 
have been familiar to Anderson and friends.

Adapted from The Guardian, Tuesday 24 October 2023, p. 6 
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/shock-of-the-old/2023/oct/24/all

Text 1A2-I

    In 2020, the state of California experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with the Bay Area fire becoming one of the largest wildfires in American history. By the end of theyear, the state recorded more than 8,600 blazes that burned down over 4 million acres of land, accounting for more than 4% of the state’s total land area.
    California is known for its wildfire seasons, which usually take place between late summer and early autumn, though they have been getting significantly more intense, destructive, and longer in the past two decades. At least one-third of the worst wildfires in USA (United States of America) history occurred in California. But what causes California such susceptibility to wildfires in the first place and what is causing the exacerbation of it?
    Wildfires can occur naturally and as a result of human activity, but three elements must be present for a wildfire to start. Fuel: Any flammable material surrounding a fire, which can come in the form of live or dead trees, dry vegetation, and other organic matter; Air: An abundance of oxygen supply. Heat sources: to ignite and burn the fuel. This could take the form of lightning strikes or human sources such as campfires or cigarettes.
    Natural wildfires, which are classified as natural disasters by the Environmental Protection Agency, can start during low precipitation, dry weather and droughts. During these conditions, dry vegetation becomes the perfect fuel for wildfires and when lightning strikes, it ignites a fire that can spread rapidly with the aid of strong winds and elevated temperatures.

Internet: (adapted). 

Could AI save the Amazon rainforest?

It took just the month of March this year to fell an area of forest in Triunfo do Xingu equivalent to 700 football pitches. At more than 16,000 sq km, this Environmental Protection Area (APA) in the southeastern corner of the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Pará, is one of the largest conservation areas in the world. And according to a new tool that predicts where deforestation will happen next, it’s also the APA at highest risk of even more destruction.

The tool, PrevisIA, is an artificial intelligence platform created by researchers at environmental nonprofit Imazon. Instead of trying to repair damage done by deforestation after the fact, they wanted to find a way to prevent it from happening at all. PrevisIA pinpointed Triunfo do Xingu as the APA at highest risk of deforestation in 2023, with 271.52 sq km of forest in the conservation area expected to be lost by the end of the year. About 5 sq km had already been destroyed in March.

Home to the endangered white-cheeked spider monkey and other vulnerable and near-threatened species, such as the hyacinth macaw and the jaguar, the conservation area is rich in biodiversity often found nowhere else in the world. But its land runs through two municipalities, Altamira and São Félix do Xingu, with some of the highest rates of deforestation in the country. And despite Triunfo do Xingu being protected under Brazilian law, illegal activities – mining, logging, land-grabbing – have ravaged the area, stripping it bare in places.

Nevertheless, with PrevisIA, there is the potential for change. Imazon is now establishing partnerships with authorities across the region, with the aim of stopping deforestation before it starts. Destruction across the Brazilian Amazon is creeping close to an all-time high. According to SAD, Imazon’s Deforestation Alert System, deforestation this March tripled compared to the same month last year, and the first quarter of 2023 saw 867 sq km of rainforest destroyed – the second largest area felled in the past 16 years.

The idea for PrevisIA emerged in 2016, when the team at Imazon analyzed data collected from SAD satellite images. Tired of getting notifications after large swaths of forest had already been cleared, they asked themselves: is it possible to generate short-term deforestation prediction models? “Existing deforestation prediction models were long-term, looking at what would happen in decades,” says Carlos Souza Jr, senior researcher at Imazon and project coordinator of PrevisIA and SAD. “We needed a new tool that could get ahead of the devastation.”Souza and his team began developing a new model capable of generating annual predictions. 

They published their findings in the journal Spatial Statistics in August 2017. The model takes a twopronged approach. First, it focuses on trends present in the region, looking at geostatistics and historical data from Prodes, the annual government monitoring system for deforestation in the Amazon. Understanding what has happened can help make predictions more precise. When already deforested 
areas are recent, this indicates gangs are operating in the area, so there’s a higher risk that nearby forest will soon be wiped out. Second, it looks at variables that put the brakes on deforestation – land protected by Indigenous and quilombola (descendent of rebel slaves) communities, and areas with bodies of water, or other terrain that doesn’t lend itself to agricultural expansion, for instance – and variables that make deforestation more likely, including higher population density, the presence of settlements and rural properties, and higher density of road infrastructure, both legal and illegal.

“They are the arteries of destruction of the forest,” says Souza, referring to unofficial roads that snake through the Amazon to facilitate illegal industrial activities. “These roads create the conditions for new deforestation.” Monitoring the construction of these roads is crucial to predicting – and eventually preventing – deforestation. According to Imazon, 90% of accumulated deforestation is concentrated within 5.5km of a road. Logging is even closer, with 90% taking place within 3km, and 85% of fires within 5km. Researchers used to comb through thousands of satellite images to see whether they could spot new roads slicing through the biome. With PrevisIA, the work is handed over to an AI algorithm that automates mapping, allowing for quicker analysis and, in turn, more frequent updates. But without a robust computational platform and the ability to update road maps more quickly, PrevisIA couldn’t be put into action. It wasn’t until 2021 that the team at Imazon partnered with Microsoft and Fundo Vale, acquiring the cloud computing power they needed to run the AI algorithm for mapping roads.

LANGLOIS, Jill. Could AI save the Amazon rainforest? The 
Guardian, Apr. 29, 2023. Available at: https://www.theguardian.
com/technology/2023/apr/29/could-ai-save-amazon-rainforestartificial-intelligence-conservation-deforestation. Retrieved on: 
July 13, 2024. Adapted

Getting Started With Savings

When you’re in your twenties, retirement seems so abstract, it might as well be thousands of years away. Maybe it feels something like that to you right now. Why save for something so many decades in the future, when every last dollar is accounted for in the here and now? Saving for anything at all, in fact, may feel impossible. 

Getting started early for retirement is smart for the same reasons you may want to put it off: time is on your side. If you set aside what you can now, the magic of compounding numbers — when you begin to earn interest on interest — can do more of the heavy lifting over time. In other words, saving early may result in having to save less over the long run, which will take some pressure off as you’re juggling other 
demands that inevitably arise. Maybe those demands will be children and all the money they require, or perhaps you’ll need some time off to care for an aging parent.

And (mostly) nobody wants to work forever — the earlier you start saving, the sooner you can stop working and dedicate more time to what’s meaningful to you. The easiest way to save — for everything, really — is automating. When you have money automatically 
and regularly transferred to its destination, you don’t have to remember to do anything. That goes for purely pleasurable financial goals as well, like saving for a big trip. It’s empowering, and will bring you closer to the things that make you both happier and more financially secure. It will take some time and patience — but your future self will thank you.

Before you begin saving, though, make sure you have a plan to knock out any high-cost debt, like debt on credit cards, where interest rates (around 22 percent) far exceed the money you might earn when investing your savings in the stock market over time (7 to 8 percent).

Besides that, get a copy of your pay stub or check your direct deposit to get a sense of your take-home pay. (Freelancers should calculate their average monthly income.) Then write down all of your expenses — rent, all insurance not already deducted from your paycheck, utilities, groceries, transportation costs, car payments, mobile phone, student loans and any other debts.

Moreover, creating a financial cushion — in the form of an emergency savings fund — can help you avoid turning to credit cards if you suddenly lose your job or hit a financial pothole, like covering a $1,000 car repair.

Financial planners suggest keeping three to six months of your expenses in emergency savings (deposited in a high-yield online savings account, which offer the best rates). That may seem like a lofty goal when you’re living on a starting salary that barely covers your bills. So start small, even if it’s saving $50 a month — $83 a month will get you to $1,000 in a year — and add more if and when you can afford it. 
Set up an automated plan that sweeps that amount from your checking account to your savings account. Then, don’t touch that money.

Many people with student loan debt often wonder if they should focus on paying down those loans before saving for retirement. The short answer: probably not. But there’s a strong case to be made to both invest and pay down your loans simultaneously, if you can.
Besides retirement, you surely have other savings goals. Maybe you’re saving for a car, a wedding party or a special trip. Since these goals have a shorter time horizon than retirement, or something you’ll need to access within three years or less, you’ll want to take 
less risk with this money. The easiest strategy is to automatically transfer money into a high-yield online savings account, say, monthly. With short-term goals, the amount you save is far more important than your return.

But if you need the money in three to 10 years — call that a medium-term goal — you may have more options, depending on how flexible you can be with your timing. Even if you don’t have large amounts to save now, setting up the infrastructure to save is the 
hardest part — and as your earnings increase, it will be much easier to save and invest more.

BERNARD, T. S. Getting started with savings. The New York 
Times. Your money, May 17, 2024. Available at: https://www.
nytimes.com/2024/05/17/your-money/saving-money.html. 
Retrieved on: July 12, 2024. Adapted. 

   Digital technology is everywhere, and it is changing the way citizens behave. From working patterns to the day-to-day services we use and the places we live, there is no aspect of modern life that remains untouched by digital tools and solutions. This represents both the biggest challenge and opportunity for public sector organizations as they seek to engage citizens and create future-proofed, sustainably-minded societies.
    The public sector plays a key role in setting the sustainability agenda for society, including the approach to circularity and recycling. While private sector companies can greatly influence the successful achievement of sustainability targets, the public sector bears the responsibility for outlining how society can achieve these goals more broadly at both national and local levels. By embracing the same digital technologies that are transforming their citizens’ lives, public sector organizations can help pivot society towards a more sustainable tomorrow. 
   In addition, there has been a rise of smart cities and the circular economy. Urban areas account for 75% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the 100 cities with the greatest footprints account for 18% of global emissions. But there are more than 70 cities worldwide pledging to become carbon neutral by 2050. 
   Public sector actors can fuel sustainable transformation by releasing capital to invest in sustainable city transformation projects and smart cities. By tapping into the value of data and green infrastructure, smart cities can combat climate risks and become more resilient to the many unexpected events of today’s increasingly unpredictable world. These cities can supportthe decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts by diffusing circular economy approaches to production and consumption. 

Internet: (adapted). 

Text 1A2-I

    In 2020, the state of California experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with the Bay Area fire becoming one of the largest wildfires in American history. By the end of theyear, the state recorded more than 8,600 blazes that burned down over 4 million acres of land, accounting for more than 4% of the state’s total land area.
    California is known for its wildfire seasons, which usually take place between late summer and early autumn, though they have been getting significantly more intense, destructive, and longer in the past two decades. At least one-third of the worst wildfires in USA (United States of America) history occurred in California. But what causes California such susceptibility to wildfires in the first place and what is causing the exacerbation of it?
    Wildfires can occur naturally and as a result of human activity, but three elements must be present for a wildfire to start. Fuel: Any flammable material surrounding a fire, which can come in the form of live or dead trees, dry vegetation, and other organic matter; Air: An abundance of oxygen supply. Heat sources: to ignite and burn the fuel. This could take the form of lightning strikes or human sources such as campfires or cigarettes.
    Natural wildfires, which are classified as natural disasters by the Environmental Protection Agency, can start during low precipitation, dry weather and droughts. During these conditions, dry vegetation becomes the perfect fuel for wildfires and when lightning strikes, it ignites a fire that can spread rapidly with the aid of strong winds and elevated temperatures.

Internet: (adapted). 

Text CG1A2-II

    The enormity of the global climate crisis is so vast that individual actions may seem meaningless: can installing LED lighting in my home or keeping my car tires inflated really help save the polar bears?
    First coined by Portland, Oregon-based writer Emma Pattee, the climate shadow aims to paint a picture of the full sum of one’s choices — and the impact they have on the planet.
    In an article she wrote in 2021, Pattee detailed her concept for measuring an individual’s impact: “Your climate shadow is a dark shape stretching out behind you. Everywhere you go, it goes too, tallying not just your air conditioning use and the gas mileage of your car, but also how you vote, how many children you choose to have, where you work, how you invest your money, how much you talk about climate change, and whether your words amplify urgency, apathy, or denial.” The larger the shadow — the greater an individual’s impact on doing good for the planet.
    In other words, rather than incentivizing purely individual actions, your climate shadow grows when those actions inspire others, knowingly or otherwise.

Kieran Mulvaney. Climate shadow is what really matters.
National Geographic (adapted).

Brazil: Online Learning Tools Harvest Children’s Data

1    “Educational websites directed at Brazilian students, including two created by state education secretariats, monitored children and collected their personal data”, Human Rights Watch said today. “The national government should revise Brazil’s data protection law by adding new safeguards to protect children online”.
2    Analysis conducted by Human Rights Watch in November 2022 and reviewed again in January 2023 found that seven educational websites extracted and sent children’s data to third-party companies, using tracking technologies designed for advertising. These websites not only watched children inside of their online classrooms, but followed them across the internet, outside school hours, and deep into their private lives.
3   “Children and their families in Brazil are being kept in the dark about the data monitoring conducted on children in online classrooms,” said Hye Jung Han, children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of protecting children, state governments have willfully enabled anyone to monitor them and collect their personal information online.”
4    Human Rights Watch found that five websites deployed particularly intrusive tracking techniques to invisibly spy on children in ways that were impossible to avoid or protect against. One of these websites uses session recording, a technique that allows a third party to watch and record a user’s behavior on a webpage. That includes mouse clicks and movements around a webpage; the digital equivalent of logging video monitoring each time a child scratches their nose or grasps their pencil in class. Typically, the third party would then scrutinize the data on behalf of the website to guess a user’s personality, their preferences, and what they are likely to do next, or how they might be influenced. Advertisers might use these insights to target the child with personalized content and ads that follow them across the internet.
5    Profiling, targeting, and advertising to children in this way infringes on their privacy, as it is neither proportionate nor necessary for these websites to function or deliver educational content. It also risks violating children’s other rights if this information is used to guide them toward outcomes that are harmful or not in their best interest. Such practices also play an enormous role in shaping children’s online experiences and determining the information they see, at a time in their lives when their opinions and beliefs are at high risk of manipulative interference.
6    Brazil’s data protection authority should stop these assaults on children’s privacy. It should require these companies and state governments to delete children’s data collected, and prevent them from further using children’s data for any purpose unrelated to providing education.
7    Brazil’s constitution protects the right to privacy. The country has also ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entitles children to special protections that guard their privacy. Brazil’s data protection law, however, – the Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, or the General Personal Data Protection Law – does not provide sufficient protections for children. It does not explicitly prohibit actors from exploiting children’s information or require them to provide high levels of safety and security for children. Lawmakers should amend the law to establish comprehensive child data protection rules, including bans on behavioral advertising and the use of intrusive tracking techniques on children. These rules should also require all actors offering online services to children – including online learning – to provide the highest levels of protection for children’s data and their privacy.

Available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/04/03/brazil--online-learning-tools-harvest-childrens-data. Retrieved on: Feb 15, 2024. Adapted.

Does Snoozing Your Alarm Really Increase Sleepiness?

        Snoozing the alarm doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel groggy the rest of the day. But it’s important to get as much sleep as you can. Getting up early in the morning is no easy task for plenty of people. That’s why alarms are important — they ensure that you wake up at your desired time. However, nobody can deny how tempting it is to try and squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep.

       According to a survey, about 57 percent of people snooze in the morning, which is defined as needing multiple alarms to wake up. If you set a single alarm and snooze it repeatedly or set several alarms at regular intervals until the time you absolutely need to get up, you are a snoozer. Waking up on the first alarm is commonly recommended, but does it really make a difference if you are woken up by one alarm compared to several ones? In a recent sleep study, researchers examine how snoozing affects an individual’s health and sleep.

      According to the study, people snooze for a variety of reasons. Most of the participants said that they just can’t get up with only the first alarm. Some say they snooze because they feel comfortable in bed, while others do it because they feel less tired when they do get up. A researcher said that snoozing might be a sign that people are waking up because of important scheduled activities — like school or work — rather than because they have adequately rested.

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

According to the preceding text, judge the following items. 

  Using your phone while on the toilet poses significant health risks, as warned by an expert, Dr. Sethi. Despite being a common habit, mindlessly scrolling or using your phone in the bathroom can lead to severe consequences. Dr. Sethi, a Harvard-trained stomach doctor, highlights that this practice, particularly during bowel movements, causes extended sitting that strains the rectum and anus, potentially resulting in hemorrhoids, anal fissures, and rectal prolapse.

      Furthermore, using phones in the bathroom makes them a breeding ground for bacteria, surpassing the hygiene levels of a public toilet seat. Dr. Sethi emphasizes the importance of avoiding phone usage while on the toilet or, if unavoidable, suggests disinfecting the phone afterward. Research spanning over a decade has consistently shown that phones harbor a significant amount of germs, including fecal matter.

      Despite these health warnings, over 65% of adults take their phones into the bathroom, with Spain having the highest usage rates (nearly 80%) and Germany the lowest (just under 55%). Interestingly, younger age groups, particularly those aged 26-41 and 18-25, are most likely to engage in this unhygienic behavior. Apart from health concerns, there’s the practical risk of dropping the phone into the toilet, with a fifth of respondents in the United States admitting to this mishap.

Internet: <www.mirror.co.uk> (adapted). 

Based on the previous text, judge the following items.

Text I

Shock of the old: Believe it or not, battery-powered vehicles 
have been around since Victorian times.

     The history of the electric car is surprisingly enraging. If you 
imagine early electric vehicles at all (full disclosure: I didn’t until 
recently), it will probably be as the quixotic and possibly dangerous 
dream of a few eccentrics, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, when 
domestic electrification became widespread. It’s easy to imagine 
some stiff-collared proto-Musk getting bored of hunting and 
affairs, eyeing his newly installed electric lights speculatively, then 
wreaking untold havoc and mass electrocutions. The reality is 
entirely different.
      By 1900, a third of all cars on the road in the US were electric; 
we’re looking at the history of a cruelly missed opportunity, and it 
started astonishingly early. The Scottish engineer Robert Anderson 
had a go at an electric car of sorts way back in the 1830s, though 
his invention was somewhat stymied by the fact rechargeable 
batteries were not invented until 1859, making his crude carriage 
something of a one-trick pony (and far less useful than an actual 
pony).
      It’s debatable whether or not Scotland was ready for this brave 
new world anyway: in 1842, Robert Davidson (another Scot, who 
had, a few years earlier, also tried his hand at an electric vehicle) 
saw his electric locomotive Galvani “broken by some malicious 
hands almost beyond repair” in Perth. The contemporary 
consensus was that it was attacked by railway workers fearful for 
their jobs.
     Despite this unpromising start, electric vehicles had entered 
widespread commercial circulation by the start of the 20th 
century, particularly in the US. Electric cabs crisscrossed 
Manhattan, 1897’s bestselling US car was electric and, when he 
was shot in 1901, President McKinley was taken to hospital in an 
electric ambulance. London had Walter Bersey’s electric taxis, and 
Berlin’s fire engines went electric in 1908; the future looked bright, 
clean and silent.
      By the 1930s, however, the tide had definitively turned against 
electric, cursed by range limitations and impractical charging times 
while petrol gained the upper hand thanks partly – and ironically –
to the electric starter motor. The Horseless Age magazine, which 
vehemently backed the petrol non-horse, would have been 
delighted. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the late 
1960s, when the US Congress passed a bill promoting electrical 
vehicle development, but nothing much actually happened until 
the Nissan Leaf sparked interest in 2009. Electric still isn’t quite 
there yet, battling infrastructure and battery problems that might 
have been familiar to Anderson and friends.

Adapted from The Guardian, Tuesday 24 October 2023, p. 6 
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/shock-of-the-old/2023/oct/24/all