Questões de Vestibular de Inglês - Palavras conectivas | Connective words

Text 2

       Because of the bright lights of the modern cities, when we look up at the sky we can see no more than 100 stars. But from dark parts of the Earth, the naked eye can see more than 5,000! And modern telescopes tell a very different story.

         With the help of some of the world’s most powerful instruments to measure the brightness of all the galaxies in one sector of the cosmos, Australian astronomers say it is probable that there are 70 sextillion stars in the visible Universe. In other words and numbers, seven followed by 22 zeroes, a really astronomical figure.

       That is more than the total number of grains of sand in all the world’s beaches and deserts, and that is only the visible Universe within range of our telescopes.

       Dr. Simon Driver, of the Australian National University, has a theory that some of them probably have life. Dr. Driver’s theory is not exactly new, and those planets are so distant, he says, that there is no real possibility for us to see or contact anyone living on them. 

Retirado do livro “Inglês série Brasil”, p. 8, 2008

Responda a questão de acordo com o texto de Lauren Camera.

Supreme Court Expands Rights for Students with Disabilities

By Lauren Camera, Education Reporter - March 22, 2017. Adaptado. 

In a unanimous decision with major implications for students with disabilities, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that schools must provide higher educational standards for children with special needs. Schools must do more than provide a ‘merely more than de minimis’ education for students with disabilities and instead must provide them with an opportunity to make "appropriately ambitious" progress in line with the federal education law.

“When all is said and done,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts, “a student offered an education program providing a ‘merely more than de minimis’ progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all.” He continued, citing a 1982 Supreme Court ruling on special education: “For children with disabilities, receiving an instruction that aims so low would be equivalent to ‘sitting idly... awaiting the time when they were old enough to drop out.’”

There are roughly 6.4 million students with disabilities between ages 3 to 21, representing roughly 13 percent of all students, according to Institute for Education Statistics. Each year 300,000 of those students leave school and just 65 percent of students with disabilities complete high school.

The case which culminated in the Supreme Court decision originated with an autistic boy in Colorado named Endrew. His parents pulled him out of school in 5th grade because they disagreed with his individualized education plan. Under federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools must work with families to develop individualized learning plans for students with disabilities.

While Endrew had been making progress in the public schools, his parents felt his plan for that year simply replicated goals from years past. As a result, they enrolled him in a private school where, they argued, Endrew made academic and social progress. 

Seeking tuition reimbursement*, they filed a complaint with the state’s department of education in which they argued that Endrew had been denied a "free appropriate public education". The school district won the suit, and when his parents filed a lawsuit in federal district court, the judge also sided with the school district. In the Supreme Court case, Endrew and his family asked for clarification about the type of education benefits the federal law requires of schools, specifically, whether it requires ‘merely more than de minimis’, or something greater.

“The IDEA demands more,” Roberts wrote in the opinion. “It requires an educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” 

*reimbursement – a sum paid to cover money that has been spent or lost.

In:<https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2017-03-22/supreme-court-expands-rights-for-students-with-disabilities> 30.03.2018

                                  Why so few nurses are men

      Ask health professionals in any country what the biggest problem in their health-care system is and one of the most common answers is the shortage of nurses. In ageing rich countries, demand for nursing care is becoming increasingly insatiable. Britain’s National Health Service, for example, has 40,000-odd nurse vacancies. Poor countries struggle with the emigration of nurses for greener pastures. One obvious solution seems neglected: recruit more men. Typically, just 5-10% of nurses registered in a given country are men. Why so few?

      Views of nursing as a “woman’s job” have deep roots. Florence Nightingale, who established the principles of modern nursing in the 1860s, insisted that men’s “hard and horny” hands were “not fitted to touch, bathe and dress wounded limbs”. In Britain the Royal College of Nursing, the profession’s union, did not even admit men as members until 1960. Some nursing schools in America started admitting men only in 1982, after a Supreme Court ruling forced them to. Senior nurse titles such as “sister” (a ward manager) and “matron” (which in some countries is used for men as well) do not help matters. Unsurprisingly, some older people do not even know that men can be nurses too. Male nurses often encounter patients who assume they are doctors.

      Another problem is that beliefs about what a nursing job entails are often outdated – in ways that may be particularly off-putting for men. In films, nurses are commonly portrayed as the helpers of heroic male doctors. In fact, nurses do most of their work independently and are the first responders to patients in crisis. To dispel myths, nurse-recruitment campaigns display nursing as a professional job with career progression, specialisms like anaesthetics, cardiology or emergency care, and use for skills related to technology, innovation and leadership. However, attracting men without playing to gender stereotypes can be tricky. “Are you man enough to be a nurse?”, the slogan of an American campaign, was involved in controversy.

      Nursing is not a career many boys aspire to, or are encouraged to consider. Only two-fifths of British parents say they would be proud if their son became a nurse. Because of all this, men who go into nursing are usually already closely familiar with the job. Some are following in the career footsteps of their mothers. Others decide that the job would suit them after they see a male nurse care for a relative or they themselves get care from a male nurse when hospitalised. Although many gender stereotypes about jobs and caring have crumbled, nursing has, so far, remained unaffected.

                                              (www.economist.com, 22.08.2018. Adaptado.)