Questões de Inglês

A Coup in Paraguay


On June 22, 2012, the Paraguayan Senate invoked a clause in the constitution which authorized it to impeach the president for "poor performance in his duties." The President was Fernando Lugo, who had been elected some three years earlier and whose term was about to end in April 2013. Under the rules, Lugo was limited to a single term of office.
Lugo charged that this was a coup, and if not technically illegal, certainly illegitimate. Almost every Latin American government agreed with this analysis, denouncing the destitution, and cutting relations in various ways with Paraguay.
The removal of Lugo had the negative consequence for those who made the coup of making possible the one thing the Paraguayan Senate had been blocking for years. Paraguay is a member of the common market Mercosur, along with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Venezuela had applied to join. This required ratification by the legislatures of all five member states. All had long since given their assent except the Paraguayan Senate. After the coup, Mercosur suspended Paraguay, and immediately welcomed Venezuela as a member.

[From: International Herald Tribune 18-7-12]



As a result of Lugo"s impeachment, many Latin American governments

a) applauded the move.
b) severed ties with Paraguay.
c) changed their analysis.
d) impeached their own authorities.
e) charged Lugo with illegitimacy.

A resposta correta é:

Godzilla’s grandchildren


In Japan there is no kudos in going to jail for your art.
Bending the rules, let alone breaking them, is largely taboo.
That was one reason Toshinori Mizuno was terrified as he
worked undercover at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power
plant, trying to get the shot that shows him in front of the
mangled third reactor holding up a referee’s red card. He was
also terrified of the radiation, which registered its highest
reading where he took the photograph. The only reason he did
not arouse suspicion, he says, is because he was in regulation
radiation kit. And in Japan people rarely challenge a man in
uniform.

Mr. Mizuno is part of ChimPom, a six-person
collective of largely unschooled artists who have spent a lot of
time getting into tight spots since the disaster, and are
engagingly thoughtful about the results.
It is easy to dismiss ChimPom’s work as a publicity
stunt. But the artists’ actions speak at least as loudly as their
images. There is a logic to their seven years of guerrilla art that
has become clearer since the nuclear disaster of March 11th
2011. In fact, Noi Sawaragi, a prominent art critic, says they
may be hinting at a new direction in Japanese contemporary
art.

Radiation and nuclear annihilation have suffused
Japan’s subculture since the film Gojira (the Japanese
Godzilla ) in 1954. The two themes crop up repeatedly in
manga and anime cartoons.

Other young artists are ploughing similar ground.
Kota Takeuchi, for instance, secretly took a job at Fukushima
Dai-ichi and is recorded pointing an angry finger at the camera
that streams live images of the site. Later he used public news
conferences to pressure Tepco, operator of the plant, about the
conditions of its workers inside. His work, like ChimPom’s,
blurs the distinction between art and activism.
Japanese political art is unusual and the new
subversiveness could be a breath of fresh air; if only anyone
noticed. The ChimPom artists have received scant coverage in
the stuffy arts pages of the national newspapers. The group
held just one show of Mr. Mizuno’s reactor photographs in
Japan. He says: “The timing has not been right. The media will
just want to make the work look like a crime.”

Internet: (adapted).



Based on the text, it is correct to say that ChimPom

a) adopts some artistic-political stance which is being largely ignored by the Japanese media nationwide.
b) produces art which is dissonant with its members" attitudes.
c) is unique in mixing art with political protest.
d) is a large group of untrained artists whose work blend art and political activism.
e) creates art which is avant-garde, and is setting the path of modern art in Japan.

A resposta correta é:

A Coup in Paraguay


On June 22, 2012, the Paraguayan Senate invoked a clause in the constitution which authorized it to impeach the president for "poor performance in his duties." The President was Fernando Lugo, who had been elected some three years earlier and whose term was about to end in April 2013. Under the rules, Lugo was limited to a single term of office.
Lugo charged that this was a coup, and if not technically illegal, certainly illegitimate. Almost every Latin American government agreed with this analysis, denouncing the destitution, and cutting relations in various ways with Paraguay.
The removal of Lugo had the negative consequence for those who made the coup of making possible the one thing the Paraguayan Senate had been blocking for years. Paraguay is a member of the common market Mercosur, along with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Venezuela had applied to join. This required ratification by the legislatures of all five member states. All had long since given their assent except the Paraguayan Senate. After the coup, Mercosur suspended Paraguay, and immediately welcomed Venezuela as a member.

[From: International Herald Tribune 18-7-12]



The unexpected result of the overthrow of President Lugo was

a) the blocking of Venezuela"s membership of Mercosur.
b) the Paraguayan Senate"s ratification of Venezuela"s entry into Mercosur.
c) the permanent expulsion of Paraguay from Mercosur.
d) the admission of Venezuela to Mercosur in Paraguay"s absence.
e) Venezuela"s denunciation of the coup at a Mercosur meeting.

A resposta correta é:

Can a planet survive the death of its sun?

Scientists find two that did.


Natalie Batalha has had plenty of experience fielding
questions from both layfolk and other scientists over the past
couple of years — and with good reason. Batalha is the deputy
principal investigator for the spectacularly successful Kepler
space telescope, which has found evidence of more than 2,000
planets orbiting distant stars so far — including, just last week,
a world almost exactly the size of Earth.

But Kepler is giving astronomers all sorts of new
information about stars as well, and that’s what an European
TV correspondent wanted to know about during an interview
last year. Was it true, she asked, that stars like the sun will
eventually swell up and destroy their planets? It’s a common
question, and Batalha recited the familiar answer, one that’s
been in astronomy textbooks for at least half a century: Yes,
it’s true. Five or six billion years from now, Earth will be burnt
to a cinder. This old news was apparently quite new to the
European correspondent, because when she reported her
terrifying scoop, she added a soupçon of conspiracy theory to
it: NASA, she suggested, was trying to downplay the story.

It was not a proud moment for science journalism, but
unexpectedly, at about the same time the European
correspondent was reporting her nonbulletin, Kepler scientists
did discover a whole new wrinkle to the planet-eating-star
scenario: it’s apparently possible for planets to be swallowed
up by their suns and live to tell the tale. According to a paper
just published in Nature, the Kepler probe has taken a closer
look at a star called KOI 55 and identified it as a “B
subdwarf”, the red-hot corpse of a sunlike star, one that already
went through its deadly expansion. Around it are two planets,
both a bit smaller than Earth — and both so close to their home
star that even the tiniest solar expansion ought to have
consumed them whole. And yet they seem, writes astronomer
Eliza Kempton in a Nature commentary, “to be alive and well.
Which begs the question, how did they survive?”

How indeed? A star like the sun takes about 10 billion
years to use up the hydrogen supply. Once the hydrogen is
gone, the star cools from white hot to red hot and swells
dramatically: in the case of our solar system, the sun’s outer
layers will reach all the way to Earth. Eventually, those outer
layers will waft away to form what’s called a planetary nebula
while the core shrinks back into an object just like KOI 55.

If a planet like Earth spent a billion years simmering
in the outer layers of a star it would, says astronomer Betsy
Green, “just evaporate. Only planets with masses very much
larger than the Earth, like Jupiter or Saturn, could possibly survive.”
And yet these two worlds, known as KOI 55.01 and
KOI 55.02, lived through the ordeal anyway. The key to this
seeming impossibility, suggest the astronomers, is that the
planets may have begun life as gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn,
with rocky cores surrounded by vast, crushing atmospheres. As
the star expanded, the gas giants would have spiraled inward
until they dipped into the stellar surface itself. The plunge
would have been enough to strip off their atmospheres, but
their rocky interiors could have survived — leaving,
eventually, the bleak tableau of the naked cores of two planets
orbiting the naked core of an elderly star.

Internet: (adapted).



Each of the options below presents a sentence of the text and a version of this sentence. Choose which one has retained most of the original meaning found in the text.

a) "A star like the sun takes about 10 billion years to use up the hydrogen supply" (L. 35-36) / It would take a sunlike star around 10 billion years to supply the necessary hydrogen.
b) "Eventually, those outer layers will waft away to form what"s called a planetary nebula while the core shrinks back into an object just like KOI 55" (L. 39-41) / Eventually, those outer layers will spew away to shape what"s called a planetary nebula while the core shrinks back into an object just like KOI 55.
c) "Natalie Batalha has had plenty of experience fielding questions from both layfolk and other scientists over the past couple of years - and with good reason" (L. 1-3) / Natalie Batalha was quite adept at discerning which questions were made by layfolk or by other scientists over the past couple of years - and with good reason.
d) "at about the same time the European correspondent was reporting her nonbulletin, Kepler scientists did discover a whole new wrinkle to the planet-eating-star scenario" (L. 21-24) / at about the same time the European correspondent was reporting her nonbulletin, Kepler scientists did stumble upon a whole new crease to the planet-eating-star scene.
e) "This old news was apparently quite new to the European correspondent, because when she reported her terrifying scoop, she added a soupçon of conspiracy theory to it" (L. 16-19) / This old news was apparently quite new to the European correspondent, because when she reported her terrifying scoop, she added a dab of conspiracy theory to it.

A resposta correta é:

Darkness and light
Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His
pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized
human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber,
blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A woman is shot
in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range.
Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the
brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly
illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny
clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the
shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to
obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the
world of flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning
flashes in the darkness of nights. He is a man who can never be
known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought
is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most
electrifying original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only
one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting —
the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was
elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the
capital crime of libel.
When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the
past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a
man in extremis. He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and
that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run,
heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught,
now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each
glimpse is different. He appears in many guises and moods.
Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and
sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a
waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. His life is a
series of intriguing and vivid tableaux — scenes that abruptly
switch from low farce to high drama.
Andrew Graham-Dixon. Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. New York – London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 (adapted).


Based on the text, judge if the following items are right ( C ) or wrong ( E ).

In the second paragraph, the author suggests that information collected under duress is not reliable.

A resposta correta é:

Armenia : prisoner of history


ARMENIA tends to feature in the news because of its problems (history, geography, demography and economics to name but a few). But a new report says not all is doom and gloom. The parliamentary elections in May showed significant improvement. Media coverage was more balanced, and the authorities permitted greater freedom of assembly, expression and movement than in previous years. That bodes well for the future.
The economy is still recovering from the global financial crisis, which saw GDP contract by 14.2% in 2009. In the same period, the construction sector contracted by more than 40%. Remittances from the diaspora dropped by 30%. That led Forbes magazine to label Armenia the world"s second worst performing economy in 2011. Over one-third of the country lives below the poverty line. Complaints of corruption are widespread, and inflation is high.
Low rates of tax collection-19.3% of GDP, compared with a 40% average in EU countries–limit the government"s reach. Cracking down on tax evasion could increase government revenue by over $400 million, says the World Bank. A few, high-profile businessmen dominate the economy. Their monopolies and oligopolies put a significant brake on business development. Their influence also weakens political will for the kind of reforms that the country sorely needs.

[From The Economist print edition June 24, 012]



With regard to the political situation in Armenia, the opening paragraph of the text is

a) unnecessarily pessimistic.
b) wildly enthusiastic.
c) depressingly frank.
d) remarkably despondent.
e) mildly optimistic.

A resposta correta é:

While on their way, the slaves selected to go to the
great House farm would make the dense old woods, for miles
around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the
highest joy and the deepest sadness. (...) They would sing, as
a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning
jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to
themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of
those songs would do more to impress some minds with the
horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole
volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning
of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself
within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those
without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was
then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were
tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.
Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to
God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild
notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable
sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing
them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts
me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling
has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I
trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing
character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception.
Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery,
and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any
one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of
slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on
allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there
let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through
the chambers of his soul, and if he is not thus impressed, it will
only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”

Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Charleston (SC): Forgotten Books, 2008, p. 26-7 (adapted).



To state that the songs "told a tale of woe" (L. 14) means that the songs

a) were accounts of intertribal warfare.
b) were hyms praising God.
c) were delusions of grandeur of an African idyllic time.
d) had to do with grief and sorrow.
e) had the purpose of keeping slaves" minds away from their hard work.

A resposta correta é:

Darkness and light
Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His
pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized
human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber,
blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A woman is shot
in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range.
Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the
brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly
illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny
clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the
shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to
obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the
world of flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning
flashes in the darkness of nights. He is a man who can never be
known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought
is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most
electrifying original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only
one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting —
the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was
elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the
capital crime of libel.
When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the
past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a
man in extremis. He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and
that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run,
heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught,
now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each
glimpse is different. He appears in many guises and moods.
Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and
sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a
waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. His life is a
series of intriguing and vivid tableaux — scenes that abruptly
switch from low farce to high drama.
Andrew Graham-Dixon. Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. New York – London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 (adapted).


Based on the text, judge if the following items are right ( C ) or wrong ( E ).

The text is built on images associated with darkness, which suggests that Caravaggio"s life, as well as the quality of his art, was shadowy and shady.

A resposta correta é:

Armenia : prisoner of history


ARMENIA tends to feature in the news because of its problems (history, geography, demography and economics to name but a few). But a new report says not all is doom and gloom. The parliamentary elections in May showed significant improvement. Media coverage was more balanced, and the authorities permitted greater freedom of assembly, expression and movement than in previous years. That bodes well for the future.
The economy is still recovering from the global financial crisis, which saw GDP contract by 14.2% in 2009. In the same period, the construction sector contracted by more than 40%. Remittances from the diaspora dropped by 30%. That led Forbes magazine to label Armenia the world"s second worst performing economy in 2011. Over one-third of the country lives below the poverty line. Complaints of corruption are widespread, and inflation is high.
Low rates of tax collection-19.3% of GDP, compared with a 40% average in EU countries–limit the government"s reach. Cracking down on tax evasion could increase government revenue by over $400 million, says the World Bank. A few, high-profile businessmen dominate the economy. Their monopolies and oligopolies put a significant brake on business development. Their influence also weakens political will for the kind of reforms that the country sorely needs.

[From The Economist print edition June 24, 012]



The international economic adversities of 2009 had multiple effects on Armenia, including

a) a massive boom in the country"s construction industry.
b) attempts to control the country"s endemic corruption.
c) critical acclaim of the country"s economy in Forbes magazine.
d) poverty-reduction plans to bring people into line.
e) a drop in funds sent home by Armenians working abroad.

A resposta correta é:

Darkness and light


Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His
pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized
human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber,
blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A woman is shot
in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range.
Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the
brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly
illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny
clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the
shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to
obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the
world of flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning
flashes in the darkness of nights. He is a man who can never be
known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought
is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most
electrifying original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only
one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting —
the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was
elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the
capital crime of libel.
When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the
past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a
man in extremis. He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and
that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run,
heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught,
now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each
glimpse is different. He appears in many guises and moods.
Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and
sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a
waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. His life is a
series of intriguing and vivid tableaux — scenes that abruptly
switch from low farce to high drama.

Andrew Graham-Dixon. Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. New York – London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 (adapted).



In line 5, "at point-blank range" means

a) in a cold-blooded manner.
b) summarily.
c) without intention.
d) fatally.
e) within a short distance.

A resposta correta é: