Questões de Inglês - Grammar

Assinale a alternativa que apresenta o termo like usado como uma conjunção, tal qual em “walk like a crab”, “spin like a helicopter” , “pop like popcorn”.

Teens' compulsive texting can cause neck injury, experts warn

[1] Dean Fishman, a chiropractor in Florida, was examining an X-ray of a 17-year-old patient's neck in 2009

when he noticed something unusual. The ghostly image of her vertebral column showed a reversal of the

curvature that normally appears in the cervical spine — a degenerative state he'd most often seen in

middle-aged people who had spent several decades of their life in poor posture.

[5] "That's when I looked over at the patient," Fishman says. She was slumped in her chair, head tilted

downward, madly typing away on her cellphone. When he mentioned to the patient's mother that the

girl's posture could be causing her headaches, he got what he describes as an "emotional response." It

seemed the teen spent much of her life in that position. Right then, Fishman says, "I knew I was on to

something."

[10] He theorized that prolonged periods of tilting her head downward to peer into her mobile device had

created excessive strain on the cervical spine, causing a repetitive stress injury that ultimately led to

spinal degeneration. He began looking through all the recent X-rays he had of young people — many of

whom had come in for neck pain or headaches — and he saw the same thing: signs of premature

degeneration.

[15] Fishman coined the term "text neck" to describe the condition and founded the Text Neck Institute (text

neck.com), a place where people can go for information, prevention and treatment.

"The head in neutral has a normal weight" of 10 to 12 pounds, says Fishman, explaining that neutral

position is ears over shoulders with shoulder blades pulled back. "If you start to tilt your head forward,

with gravity and the distance from neutral, the weight starts to increase."

[20] "When your head tilts forward, you're loading the front of the disks," says Dr. Kenneth Hansraj, study 20

author and chief of spine surgery at New York Spine Surgery & Rehabilitation Medicine. Though the study

didn't look at long-term effects of this position, Hansraj says that, after seeing approximately 30,000

spinal surgery patients, he's witnessed "the way the neck falls apart."

In addition, Fishman says, text-neck posture can lead to pinched nerves, arthritis, bone spurs and

[25] muscular deformations. "The head and shoulder blades act like a seesaw. When the head goes forward,

the shoulder blades will flare out … and the muscles start to change over time."

Much like tennis elbow doesn't occur only in people who play tennis, text neck isn't exclusive to people

who compulsively send text messages. Hansraj says people in high-risk careers include dentists,

architects and welders, whose heavy helmets make them especially vulnerable. He adds that many daily

[30] activities involve tilting the head down, but they differ from mobile-device use in intensity and 

propensity.

"Washing dishes is something nobody enjoys, so you do it quickly. And while your head is forward, it's

probably tilted at 30 or 40 degrees," he says. People tend to change position periodically while reading a

book, and they glance up frequently while holding an infant. But mobile devices are typically held with

[35] the neck flexed forward at 60 degrees or greater, and many users, particularly teens, use them

compulsively. The study reports that people spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads

tilted at a sharp angle over their smartphones, amounting to 700 to 1,400 hours a year.

To remedy the problem, Hansraj has a simple message: "Keep your head up." While texting or scrolling,

people should raise their mobile devices closer to their line of sight. The Text Neck Institute has

[40] developed the Text Neck Indicator, an interactive app that alerts users when their smartphones are held 40

at an angle that puts them at risk for text neck.

Fishman also recommends that people take frequent breaks while using their mobile devices, as well as

do exercises that strengthen muscles behind the neck and between the shoulder blades in order to

increase endurance for holding the device properly.

[45] He adds, "I'm an avid technology user — and I use it in the proper posture."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/la-he-text-neck-20150404-story.html#page=1

TEXT

  Brazil plowed billions of dollars into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the longdelayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new public buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were abandoned right after being constructed. There was even an illfated U.F.O. museum built with federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit like a lost ship among the weeds.

  As Brazil sprints to get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run up against a catalog of delays, some caused by deadly construction accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It is building bus and rail systems for spectators that will not be finished until long after the games are done. But the World Cup projects are just a part of a bigger national problem casting a pall over Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish projects conceived when economic growth was surging that now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget.

  Some economists say the troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy, irresponsible allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.

  Huge street protests have been aimed at costly new stadiums being built in cities like Manaus and Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats after the World Cup events are finished, adding to concerns that even more white elephants will emerge from the tournament.

  “The fiascos are multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas, a Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re waking up to the reality that immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our streets.”

  The growing list of troubled development projects includes a $3.4 billion network of concrete canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of northeast Brazil — which was supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well as dozens of new wind farms idled by a lack of transmission lines and unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de Janeiro’s skyline.

  Economists surveyed by the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy growing just 1.63 percent this year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010, making 2014 the fourth straight year of slow growth.

  President Dilma Rousseff’s supporters contend that the public spending has worked, helping to keep unemployment at historical lows and preventing what would have been a much worse economic slowdown had the government not pumped its considerable resources into infrastructure development.

  Still, a growing chorus of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure projects reveals weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism. First, they say, Brazil gives extraordinary influence to a web of state-controlled companies, banks and pension funds to invest in ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the vast public bureaucracy cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.

  “Some ventures never deserved public money in the first place,” said Sérgio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, pointing to the millions in state financing for the overhaul of the Glória hotel in Rio, owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike Batista. The project was left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup, when Mr. Batista’s business empire crumbled last year. “For infrastructure projects which deserve state support and get it,” Mr. Lazzarini continued, “there’s the daunting task of dealing with the risks that the state itself creates.”

  The Transnordestina, a railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast Brazil, illustrates some of the pitfalls plaguing projects big and small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a cost of about $1.8 billion, the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000 miles, is now expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from state banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016. But with work sites abandoned because of audits and other setbacks months ago in and around Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s poorest states, even that timeline seems optimistic. Long stretches where freight trains were already supposed to be running stand deserted. Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the shadow of ghostly railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys. “Thieves are pillaging metal from the work sites,” said Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician who labored with thousands of others before work halted last year. “Now there are just these bridges left in the middle of nowhere.”

  Brazil’s transportation minister, César Borges, expressed exasperation with the delays in finishing the railroad, which is needed to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the bureaucracies that delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court of Accounts; the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped slaves; and the Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors. Still, Mr. Borges insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just Brazil.”

  Some economists contend that the way Brazil is investing may be hampering growth instead of supporting it. The authorities encouraged energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot operate because they lack transmission lines to connect to the electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers worry over potential electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams run dry amid a drought.

  Then there is the extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in southeast Brazil where residents claimed to have seen an alien in 1996. Officials secured federal money to build the museum, but now all that remains of the unfinished project is the rusting carcass of what looks like a flying saucer. “That museum,” said Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of São Paulo, “is an insult to both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial beings like ourselves who foot the bill for yet another project failing to deliver.” 

Adapted from www.nytimes.com/April 12, 2014.

The sentence “…immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our streets” contains a/an