Questões de Língua Inglesa do ano 2025

Rain Is Coming to Burning Los Angeles and Will Bring Its Own Risks

    Rain is forecast to begin as soon as Saturday afternoon and to continue as late as Monday evening, says meteorologist Kristan Lund of the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office. The area desperately needs the precipitation, but experts are warily monitoring the situation because rain poses its own risks in recently burned areas— most notably the potential occurrence of mudslides and similar hazards. “Rain is good because we’ve been so dry,” Lund says. “However, if we get heavier rain rates or we get the thunderstorms, it’s actually a lot more dangerous because you can get debris flows.”

    Fires do a couple of different things to the landscape that can increase the risk of burned material, soil and detritus hurtling out of control. When fires burn hot or long enough, they leave an invisible layer of waxy material just under the surface of the ground. This develops from decomposing leaves and other organic material, which contain naturally hydrophobic or water-repellent compounds. Fire can vaporize this litter, and the resulting gas seeps into the upper soil—where it quickly cools and condenses, forming the slippery layer.

    When rain falls on ground that has been affected by this phenomenon, it can’t sink beyond the hydrophobic layer— so the water flows away, often hauling debris with it. “All of the trees, branches, everything that’s been burned—unfortunately, if it rains, that stuff just floats,” Lund says. “It’s really concerning.” Even a fire that isn’t severe enough to create a hydrophobic layer can still cause debris flows, says Danielle Touma, a climate scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Under normal conditions, trees and other plants usually trap some rain above the surface, slowing the water’s downward journey. But on freshly burned land there’s much less greenery to interfere; all the rain immediately hits the ground. [...]

    Fortunately, the rain should also help firefighters tame the blazes that remain active. The largest, the Palisades Fire, is currently 77 percent contained. The second largest, the Eaton Fire, is 95 percent contained. The Hughes Fire is third largest and only 56 percent contained. A fire can be fully contained but still burning. The containment percentage refers to the amount of the perimeter that has barriers that firefighters expect will prevent further spread.

Scientific American. January 27th, 2025. Adaptado. 

    Spending time in space and having an unrivalled view of planet Earth is an experience many of us dream of, but the human body evolved to function in the gravity of Earth. So fully recovering from spending time in the weightlessness of space can take years.  

    “It’s a fact that space is by far the most extreme environment that humans have ever encountered and we’ve just not evolved to handle the extreme conditions,” Professor Damian Bailey, who studies human physiology, says. To begin with, the heart and blood vessels have an easier time as they no longer have to pump blood against gravity — and they start to weaken. And the bones become weaker and more brittle. There should be a balance between the cells breaking down old bone and those making new, but that balance is disrupted without the feedback and resistance of working against gravity. “Every month, about 1% of bones and muscles are going to wither away — it’s accelerated ageing,” Professor Bailey says. 

    Microgravity also distorts the vestibular system, which is how you balance and sense which way is up. In space, there is no up, down or sideways. It can be disorientating when you go up — and again when you return to Earth.

   The pursuit of space exploration represents one of the most captivating undertakings of the human race, serving as a testament to our inherent drive to comprehend the cosmos and our position within it. As humanity expands its reach beyond the confines of Earth, the intricate and essential relationship between technology and law grows increasingly intricate and indispensable.

   The rapid progress of technology has ushered us into an era when endeavours in outer space, previously confined to the realm of science fiction, are now becoming tangible and feasible. The present circumstances require a comprehensive legal structure encompassing the existing range of space endeavours and the flexibility to accommodate dynamic technological advancements. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 set the foundational legal principles governing space exploration activities. However, as humanity continues to explore space and private companies participate alongside sovereign nations, the intersection of technology and law serves as both a catalyst for progress and a cause of disagreement.

Bansi Kaneria; Shivam Pandey. Interplay Between Technology and Law in Space Exploration. In: IOSR Journal of Environmental Science Toxicology and Food Technology, 2024, 18 (03): 31-46 (adapted). 

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   By the middle years of the 20th century, the optimistic story of limitless progress through scientific and technological advance came to be rivalled and sometimes overshadowed by a much more pessimistic, even apocalyptic vision of the trajectory of the modern project. It began to seem increasingly possible that technology would come to master its creators and carry humanity toward unforeseen and possibly catastrophic outcomes.

   Premonitions of technological wizardry leading to disasters are extremely old, dating back at least to the myth of Icarus, who is said to have fatally fallen into the sea after flying too close to the sun on wings his father, Daedalus, constructed. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, dark anticipations became increasingly widespread, in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. Perhaps technology, not man, was “in the saddle,” as Henry Adams worried. And perhaps machines, becoming ever more capable and interconnected, were the next step in the evolution of life, destined to dominate and eventually eliminate humanity, as Samuel Butler warned. The contours of the future, H. G. Wells announced in one of his famous lectures, “The Discovery of the Future,” were difficult to discern but would surely be unlike the past or the present, and definitely included disasters of new types and magnitudes.

   In the ghastly world wars, technological advances empowered barbarism on a new scale, destroying the credibility of the simple modernist faith that more potent tools are a straight path to human betterment. Rather, technological advance has produced a cornucopia of double-edged swords, with amplified possibilities for both progress and disaster. A growing herd of horsemen of the anthropogenic apocalypse have ominously appeared on the human horizon of possibility: nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, total surveillance despotism, runaway artificial intelligence, and rampant environmental decay.

Daniel Deudney. Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 (adapted).  

Texto para a questão

Rain Is Coming to Burning Los Angeles and Will Bring Its Own Risks

    Rain is forecast to begin as soon as Saturday afternoon and to continue as late as Monday evening, says meteorologist Kristan Lund of the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office. The area desperately needs the precipitation, but experts are warily monitoring the situation because rain poses its own risks in recently burned areas— most notably the potential occurrence of mudslides and similar hazards. “Rain is good because we’ve been so dry,” Lund says. “However, if we get heavier rain rates or we get the thunderstorms, it’s actually a lot more dangerous because you can get debris flows.”

    Fires do a couple of different things to the landscape that can increase the risk of burned material, soil and detritus hurtling out of control. When fires burn hot or long enough, they leave an invisible layer of waxy material just under the surface of the ground. This develops from decomposing leaves and other organic material, which contain naturally hydrophobic or water-repellent compounds. Fire can vaporize this litter, and the resulting gas seeps into the upper soil—where it quickly cools and condenses, forming the slippery layer.

    When rain falls on ground that has been affected by this phenomenon, it can’t sink beyond the hydrophobic layer— so the water flows away, often hauling debris with it. “All of the trees, branches, everything that’s been burned—unfortunately, if it rains, that stuff just floats,” Lund says. “It’s really concerning.” Even a fire that isn’t severe enough to create a hydrophobic layer can still cause debris flows, says Danielle Touma, a climate scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Under normal conditions, trees and other plants usually trap some rain above the surface, slowing the water’s downward journey. But on freshly burned land there’s much less greenery to interfere; all the rain immediately hits the ground. [...]

    Fortunately, the rain should also help firefighters tame the blazes that remain active. The largest, the Palisades Fire, is currently 77 percent contained. The second largest, the Eaton Fire, is 95 percent contained. The Hughes Fire is third largest and only 56 percent contained. A fire can be fully contained but still burning. The containment percentage refers to the amount of the perimeter that has barriers that firefighters expect will prevent further spread.

Scientific American. January 27th, 2025. Adaptado.