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
In “Despite this unpromising start” (4th paragraph), the first word can be replaced by:
Na era da inteligência artificial, como fica
a segurança de dados?
Pesquisadores explicam que as novas técnicas de computação abrem novas possibilidades para golpes e invasões cibernéticas
As empresas de computação em nuvem chocaram o mundo com as inteligências artificiais lançadas no ano de 2023. Muitos se maravilharam com o mundo de possibilidades que esses programas inteligentes abriram. Já outros se chocaram com as implicações na área da segurança, direito autoral e na capacidade de distorção da realidade factual que as ferramentas novas proporcionam, e o debate pela regulamentação do uso segue em curso nas casas legislativas de diversos países.
Conforme explica um professor da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, as ferramentas de inteligência artificial abrem novos perigos na área de segurança de dados em dois fronts diferentes. O primeiro deles está na encriptação e na desencriptação dos dados.
“Existe de fato uma briga entre os que querem guardar informação sigilosa de forma segura e os que querem abrir essa informação para decifrar. Existem algoritmos clássicos que fazem isso e que podem ser melhorados com técnicas de inteligência artificial. Em particular, técnicas de aprendizado de máquina, aquelas que usam observações, experimentos, experiências para melhorar o desempenho de algoritmos”, explica o professor.
A outra batalha é travada no meio da engenharia social, ou seja, os usuários mal-intencionados exploram as vulnerabilidades humanas de outros usuários para obter materiais confidenciais, como senhas bancárias, dados de navegação e outras informações de cunho particular.
“As vulnerabilidades podem acontecer na medida em que você tem sistemas artificiais interagindo com os seres humanos. Você pode ter sistemas que, na interação com o usuário, obtêm dados inadvertidamente. Aí, o usuário é levado a revelá-los. Pode haver sistemas que também são feitos para interagir com o usuário de forma adequada, mas têm alguma falha. O usuário pode ser enganado e revelar essas
informações para um outro agente inadequado”, conta ele.
“A inteligência artificial consegue, com as velhas técnicas, simular situações da vida real. E, nesse sentido, a coisa ficou feia, um cidadão não consegue mais distinguir entre o artificial e o natural e pode ser enganado pela imagem e pela voz. Tudo que é simulado passa a ser quase natural para um cidadão comum.”
Técnicas de autenticação de imagens e documentos podem auxiliar os usuários a não serem enganados com o uso da inteligência artificial. Algumas empresas, por exemplo, já colocam marcas d’água em todos os vídeos que a ferramenta produz, outra maneira de impedir o uso malicioso da IA generativa. E, é claro, crimes cibernéticos também são crimes, e também é papel da Justiça agir nesses casos para punir os criminosos: “Os crimes de falsificação ficam mais fáceis com esses processadores mais potentes. É simulada alguma coisa verdadeira, mas quem é que programa esses simuladores? São pessoas hábeis, com talento para programar, mas é sempre um
ser humano por trás”, conclui o professor.
PEROSSI, J. Na era da inteligência artificial, como fica a segurança de dados? Jornal da USP. Disponível em: https://jornal.usp.br/
radio-usp/na-era-da-inteligencia-artificial-como-fica-a-seguranca-
-de-dados/. Acesso em: 8 maio 2024. Adaptado
In the sentence of paragraph 1 “When you’re in your twenties, retirement seems so abstract, it might as well be thousands of years away”, the pronoun it refers to
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
The main purpose of the text is to
Based on Text I, mark the statements below as TRUE (T) or FALSE (F).
I. In auditing, taking heed of what other parties have to say needs to be downplayed.
II. Auditors are generally unobtrusive when carrying out their jobs.
III. Trust is obtained when auditors eschew straightforward statements.
The statements are, respectively,
Em 24 de outubro de 2019, o site https://www.amnesty.org/en/ latest/news/2019/10/gunviolence-report/ publicou depoimentos demulheres reais, do estado de Louisiana, nos Estados Unidos, que sofreram violência doméstica.
Do depoimento transcrito a seguir, foram extraídas frases as quais estão apresentadas isoladamente na sequência.
Preencha as lacunas do texto com as frases destacadas e, a seguir, assinale a alternativa que contém a sequência CORRETA na ordem de cima para baixo:
“Angela's story:
In my case, it started as verbal abuse. I’d known my partner for 20 years and he was a good person. _______________________. After his mum died, he bought several guns including a machete and a shotgun. He became more combative, not only with me but with others and through his social media. I couldn’t do anything right. One evening in early November it turned physical. We were having a conversation and at some point it escalated and I asked him to leave. I walked over to the door, opened it and said we could have the conversation another day. _____________________________. I managed to yell for our oldest son and he got off of me and left. We’d broken up, but we were starting to work things out again, when one morning we had a disagreement________________________. I can only remember the last two gunshots._____________________________. He returned with my cell phone and I told him to dial 911. I felt as though I was dying. My legs felt prickly. I didn’t realize he’d shot me in the back and I was already paralyzed. (...)
Fonte: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/10/gun-violence-report/
I. He grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt, threw me out my door and got on top of me and started choking me.
II. I was in the bathtub, when he came in and shot me.
III. He started changing in 2015.
IV. I look up at him and he says ‘Look what you made me do Angie’, ‘You made me shoot you.
Do statements agree with the information from the Text 2? Decide True (T) if the statement agrees with the information from the article or False (F) if the statement contradicts the information from the article.
( ) The study has shown that although people who read tend to be more intelligent, they have more difficulties with social interactions.
( ) The study with 124 participants researched their own reading preferences as well as how they notice what is happening to other people.
( ) People who prefer watching TV tend to be more polite and better behaved.
( ) Literature as a whole affects people equally, regardless of the genre.
( ) The study does not decisively prove that reading actually makes people become nicer.
Now choose the alternative with the correct sequence
In the segment of 5th paragraph “the worst outcome would be to let inflation take root”, the words would be signal
In the fragment in the second paragraph of the text, “With powerful AI tools, banks can make informed decisions faster by using predictive analysis, which is the central point of AI and ML”, the word in bold refers to
Considering the context presented in the text, the sentence “The sinking took place nowhere near an enemy” (l. 05-06) suggests that the ship’s location in relation to an enemy was:
Consider the following statements about the word “can” in the sentence “Video can explain steps more naturally” (l. 13) in the context presented in the article:
I. Its past form is “could”.
II. It could be replaced by “must” with no significative changes in meaning.
III. It expresses permission.
Which statements are correct?
The options below could replace the bold word “however” (l. 10) with no significative changes in meaning, EXCEPT for:
A suffix is a letter, or a group of letters attached to the end of a word to form a new word or to change the grammatical function (or part of speech) of the word.
Choose the alternative that CORRECTLY identifies the noun which has a suffix that indicates “a person who does something”.
Leia o texto a seguir e responda o que se pede:
A Serbian volleyball player suspended after making anti-Asian racist gesture during match
against Thailand
A Serbian volleyball player has been suspended for two matches after she was caught on camera stretching her eyelids -- a racist gesture used to mock people with Asian heritage -- during an international competition between Serbia and Thailand.
Sanja Djurdjevic violated the sport's disciplinary rules on June 1 while competing in the match in Italy, according to a statement given Tuesday from the FIVB Disciplinary Panel Sub-Committee.
In addition to the suspension, the independent body, which is responsible for imposing disciplinary sanctions within FIVB competitions, fined Serbia's volleyball federation the equivalent of $22,000. According to the panel, the FIVB will donate the money to a cause dedicated to tackling discriminatory behavior and/or to fund educational programs on cultural sensitivity.
Fonte: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/09/sport/serbian-volleyball-player-anti-asian-racist-gesture-sptintl/index.html
Considerando as informações contidas no texto, assinale a alternativa INCORRETA:
