Questões

Read Text II and answer the question that follows.

Text II

      June 15, 2023 - Debates over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are currently thriving, including debates over the degree to which corporate diversity efforts are valuable, whether chief diversity officers can succeed, and whether corporate diversity commitments can produce lasting change.

      Over the past year, at least a dozen U.S. state legislatures have proposed or passed laws targeting DEI efforts, including laws aimed at limiting DEI roles and efforts in businesses and higher education and laws eliminating DEI spending, trainings, and statements at public institutions. Moreover, with the U.S. Supreme Court poised to address affirmative action in two cases involving the consideration of race in higher education admissions this summer, debates in the U.S. regarding DEI initiatives are likely far from over.

      At the same time, DEI-related legal requirements continue to grow in other jurisdictions, and with global financial institutions facing expanding environmental, social, and governance (ESG)- related trends and regulations in the EU and other jurisdictions, as well as global expectations regarding their role in ESG, including DEI-related corporate developments and initiatives, these matters are likely to continue to work their way into capital allocations and the costs of doing business, as well as into the expectations of certain stakeholders.

      This widening gap between global expectations and regulation regarding DEI-related matters and the concerns of some constituents in the U.S. over the role of DEI in corporate decision-making is likely to continue growing for the foreseeable future, putting companies between the proverbial rock and hard place.

      What these developments make clear is that corporate DEI efforts are, and likely have been for some time, riskier than many companies may initially appreciate. And the risks associated with DEI initiatives are only positioned to grow and expand as companies look to thread the DEI needle and make a broader and potentially more divergent set of stakeholders happy, or at least less annoyed, with their DEI-related commitments and initiatives. In this article, we discuss the top four legal risks that companies often fail to address in their DEI efforts.

[…]

(From https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/diversity-matters-four-scarylegal-risks-hiding-your-dei-program-2023-06-15/)

Read the text below and choose the correct option in question.

Artificial intelligence

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since their development in the 1940s, digital computers have been programmed to carry out very complex tasks – such as discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess – with great proficiency. Despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match full human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in executing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, voice or handwriting recognition, and chatbots.

    All but the simplest human behavior is ascribed to intelligence, while even the most complicated insect behavior is usually not taken as an indication of intelligence. What is the difference? Consider the behavior of the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus. When the female wasp returns to her burrow with food, she first deposits it on the threshold, checks for intruders inside her burrow, and only then, if the coast is clear, carries her food inside. The real nature of the wasp’s instinctual behavior is revealed if the food is moved a few inches away from the entrance to her burrow while she is inside: on emerging, she will repeat the whole procedure as often as the food is displaced. Intelligence conspicuously absent in the case of the wasp must include the ability to adapt to new circumstances.

    Psychologists generally characterize human intelligence not by just one trait but by the combination of many diverse abilities. Research in AI has focused chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, and using language.

(Adapted from: https://www.britannica.com/technology/artificial-intelligence)

O texto a seguir apresenta lacunas numeradas de 41 a 51, das quais foi omitida uma ou mais palavras. Assinale a alternativa que apresenta a palavra ou expressão que completa corretamente cada uma das lacunas numeradas, tanto quanto à correção gramatical como quanto ao sentido e estruturação do texto.

Why talk about language teaching methods at all? In recent years, a number of writers have criticized the very concept of (41) in our field. “Let’s just focus on learners and teachers and everything else will fall into place,” they seem to suggest. Some say that teachers see methods as prescriptions for classroom behavior and follow them too (42) , too inflexibly. By contrast, others argue that in planning their lessons, (43) don’t really think about codified methods at all. In the one view, methods and the prefabricated materials that embody them (44) teachers to mere technicians; in the other, teachers are mere improvisers in the here-and-now, with no use for general statements about how (45) acts may fit together. Either view should make any writer about methods and materials stop and think.

Having stopped and (46) , I find myself giving a single reply to both of the above objections: Language teachers are simply not “mere.” They are neither mere technicians (47) mere improvisers. They are professionals who make their own decisions, informed by their own (48) but informed also by the findings of researchers and by the accumulated, distilled, crystallized experience of their peers.

Let me then suggest three questions that we might well ask about “method,” together with my proposed answers:

What is a “method”? A method is more concrete than (49) . An approach is a set of understandings about what is at stake in learning and also about the equipment, mechanical or neurological, that is at work in learning. At the same time, a method is more abstract than a teaching act, which is a one-time event that can be recorded on videotape and on the neurocortexes of learners.

Is it possible to evaluate or to profit from an approach without embodying it in some kind of (50) ? Possible, perhaps, to some limited degree, but not easy.

Is it possible to improvise teaching acts apart from some more or less conscious approach? Possible, perhaps, but rare.

“Method,” then, seems to occupy a strategic mid-position between approach and (51) . For this reason, whoever would either think usefully about teaching or would teach thoughtfully can profit from learning about methods.

_{(E. W. Stevick, Working with Teaching Methods)}