Questões de Vestibular de Inglês - Verbos modais | Modal verbs

Text 1

Of prime importance in reading is vocabulary skill. The reader must know the meanings of enough of the words in a sentence for it to make sense and also know how to combine individual word meanings within a sentence. Once the student is past the initial stages of reading, he spends a large percentage of his time encountering new vocabulary, which can be approached in a number of ways. The teacher can give the meaning for each new word, as is common in teaching reading to non-native students.

Or, also common, the student may spend hours with a dictionary writing native-language glosses into his text. For the native speaker of English, the most common form of vocabulary building is guessing from context and/or word formations.

In many settings in which English is taught as a foreign language (EFL) there are high degrees of emphasis on rote memorization. Because vocabulary development skills are seldom specifically taught, the student is not aware of the skills or their benefits. Most students have been trained to panic. Their first

reaction on encountering a new word in a text is to stop and ask for a definition, even if the rest of the sentence defines it. The student of English as a foreign language cannot begin to read with full comprehension until he has been taught to conquer the unknown word by using contextual aids, that is, the formation of the word itself and the environment in which it is found.

Anna Smajdor, an ethicist at the University of East Anglia, claims that people’s control over their reproductive choices will be dramatically altered if sperm and eggs can be created from stray skin cells. A woman could, for example, pick up a bit of bodily detritus from a prominent man, take it to a laboratory and give birth to his genetic child. Smajdor says that what has been termed ‘reprogrammable biology’ gives us the capacity to make cells act in new ways, blurring what we mean by an egg or sperm or even embryo. She points out that the boundaries between these categories have become very fluid, with the development of techniques that allow us to alter their genetic make-up or prompt them to behave in new ways. This raises very perplexing questions about ethics, law and regulation.

    Most religions would welcome ways of giving infertile men and women a possibility to produce sperm and eggs, although they might object if making gametes involved destroying human embryos. Research into the reproductive process has triggered debates among scientists about how far human reproduction should be altered. All agree that men should be capable of producing eggs: the fact that men have an X chromosome, like women, should make it possible. Thus, male gay couples could, with the help of a surrogate mother, have their own biological baby. But things are more complicated when it comes to women becoming fathers: some scientists believe that the Y (male) chromosome is so important to sperm that attempts to use female cells will be doomed. But on one point, everyone can agree: for women to father children and men to make eggs would be as significant a breakthrough as the birth of the first test tube baby 30 years ago.

Adapted from The Daily Telegraph, February 12th, 2008

Read the text below and answer the following question based on it.

It showed the Dutch have nearly an hour more in bed every night than people in Singapore or Japan.

The study, published in Science Advances, also found women routinely get more sleep than men, with middle-aged men getting the least of all.

The researchers say the findings could be used to deal with the "global sleep crisis".

The study found people in Japan and Singapore had an average of seven hours and 24 minutes sleep while the people in the Netherlands had eight hours and 12 minutes.

The later a country stays up into the night, the less sleep it gets. But what time a country wakes up seems to have little effect on sleep duration.

Prof Daniel Forger, one of the researchers, said there was a conflict between our desire to stay up late and our bodies urging us to get up in the morning.

The study also showed women had about 30 minutes more per night in bed than men, particularly between the ages of 30 and 60.

And that people who spend the most time in natural sunlight tended to go to bed earlier. A strong effect of age on sleep was also detected. A wide range of sleep and wake-up times was found in young people but "that really narrows in old age," said Prof Forger.

"It highlights that although our body clocks are programming us to do certain things, we can't as we're ruled by social circumstances.

"We won't know the long-term consequences of this for many years."

Adaptado de:<http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36226874> Acessado em 7 de maio de 2016.