Curso de Língua Inglesa

Foundations · Aula 1

PART I · LANGUAGE PRACTICE

Pedagogical Goals | Objetivos Pedagógicos
Prática de interpretação e compreensão de textos autênticos; expansão de vocabulário
temático; prática de tradução para o português; prática de técnicas de resumo;
internalização de estruturas gramaticais.

Active Reading | Leitura Ativa

Leia o texto a seguir. Ao longo da leitura, cumpra as seguintes tarefas:
● Apenas circule ou sublinhe novas palavras, expressões idiomáticas (idioms),
locuções gramaticais (phrasal verbs), locuções, conectivos, collocations,
colligations desconhecidas e interessantes. Não anote nada ainda;
● Sublinhe as estruturas gramaticais que lhe chamaram a atenção;
● Destaque também os parágrafos ou orações cujas ideias principais não tiverem
sido bem compreendidas;
● Identifique o tópico frasal e as ideias principais de cada parágrafo.

ENTERTAINMENT
Shoot em up! How TV fell in love with video
games
From Halo and Resident Evil to emo apocalypse thriller The Last of Us,
video game adaptations are storming our screens. Is this a fast-track to
quality TV – or a cynical cash grab?

For a long time, it was an accepted truth that video games just didn’t work on screen.
Remember the quasi-cyberpunk 1993 Super Mario movie, starring Dennis Hopper? It was
so bad that basically everyone involved with it has disavowed it. And TV? Kids of the 90s
will remember the incredibly annoying voice of Sonic the Hedgehog on Saturday morning

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TV – or the permanent repeats of the Pokémon anime series – but other than that, the
entertainment world never took games seriously.

Now, though, things are different. In the past few years, Hollywood has managed to
produce a few video-game films that are actually watchable, such as Detective Pikachu
and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. And barely a week goes by without an announcement that
another game has been picked up for TV – all of which are aimed at adults, not kids or
tweens. There’s a science fiction series based on Halo, the first-person shooter from 2001
whose original fans are well into their 30s and beyond. There’s a Netflix adaptation of
Assassin’s Creed, the historical action game that makes you run around in elaborate
simulations of ancient Egypt or Renaissance Italy. There’s even a series based on Cuphead,
a well-loved but niche run-and-gun game that is itself a homage to early 1920s cartoons.

The simplest explanation for the boom of game adaptations is, predictably, money. Video
games are bigger business than ever before – the games industry was worth $175bn in 2021
(for context, the entire global movie industry is worth $100bn). The audience who play
them have also grown up since the Pokémon heyday; 80% of US video game players are
over 18 and more than half of them – 52% – are between 18 and 45, the “key demographic”
TV executives love most.

“Video games have evolved from a fringe activity to mainstream entertainment, and
Netflix is looking to retain and acquire subscribers by plugging into what’s popular with
younger audiences,” says longstanding games industry researcher Joost van Dreunen. “As
streaming services compete over content, they look for categories to give them an edge.
So HBO and Amazon Prime have been developing game-based series… When done
properly and taken seriously, these adaptations can serve everyone, including the
audience.”

That last point is crucial: audiences (and critics) can smell it a mile off when a show is a
cynical cash-in. Helpfully, the first generations that grew up with games are now in their
40s and 50s and have aged into power: speaking to people in the TV and games industries,
it is clear the writers and directors of these new shows are people who actually play
games, and genuinely love the source material – such as Supernatural showrunner Andrew
Dabb, who is heading up the Netflix Resident Evil series that premieres in July, and says
it’s his “favourite game of all time”. They appreciate video games in all their empowering,
exciting and often unintentionally hilarious weirdness. There ’s a much better chance
they’ll make TV worth watching.

Nonetheless, when a game gets picked up for TV, the original creative team are often not
involved. So the people who spent years creating the game itself – on big-budget projects,
the narrative team alone can comprise 10 or 20 people – are usually left sitting nervously
on the sidelines. That can be a nerve-wracking experience, especially given the track
record. Bruce Straley was the co-creator of Naughty Dog’s hard-hitting, critically acclaimed
post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us, the tale of a teenage girl called Ellie and her

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reluctant father figure Joel on a journey across the devastated remnants of America. When
The Last of Us was picked up by HBO in 2020, he had mixed feelings.

“Our industry has proven its value and doesn’t need other mediums to validate us… I
don’t have a problem with adaptations. But in my – and I think all of our – experience,
something always falls short with the execution … I know very little about the production,
but it’s hard for me to fully endorse it.”

This is partly due to the difference between writing for games and for TV. “With The Last of
Us, I wanted the player to feel the same feelings Joel and Ellie might be feeling at any
given moment,” says Straley. “That meant the player had to be 100% there throughout
their journey, participating in all the ups and downs, turns and surprises of their survival,
and their joys. I believed that taking as much story out of cutscenes [non-interactive
sequences] and creating playable scenes instead enabled us to create a significantly more
impactful experience than I ever could in a TV show or film. So we have to ask, what makes
a game great? And will an adaptation add to the core experience or diminish it?”

The gulf between writing for a linear medium such as TV and an interactive one like games
is at the heart of what makes these adaptations so difficult. “With film and TV, every single
moment is precious. If something is not in service to the greater narrative, it’s gonna get
cut,” says Sam Winkler, a senior writer at Gearbox Entertainment, creators of the
Borderlands series – most recently Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a madcap Dungeons and
Dragons-inspired adventure through the mind of a cheerful teen psychopath. “In games
there’s so much more breathing room, and I think that’s why the comedy has such a
different flavour. In Borderlands we have to be ready for the player to do some weird thing
in the middle of the main story, we have to be ready for a joke to pop off at any time, and
it has to read well in any situation.”

As a result, the best adaptations are often ones that focus on channelling the atmosphere
of the original game, rather than obsessing over their plot. “The ones that people have
responded well to, like the Castlevania TV series, take the setting and characters and try to
give viewers the feeling players had the first time they played these games, without
sticking rock-solid to the story,” says Winkler. “That’s the biggest mistake anyone makes –
and I’m honestly surprised that people keep making it – it’s kind of wild. Of course, it all
depends on how something gets greenlit: is it a passion project from someone who played
the games and wants to bring it to life? Or an executive noticing that games are making
more money than movies saying we gotta get a piece of that? It’s sad when a project is a
cash grab. You can always tell when the people behind a project care and understand the
source material.”

This guarded scepticism is repeated by most people in the games industry when we talk
about adaptations – and it’s not unwarranted. Game developers, long patronised by the
rest of the entertainment industry, wonder what motivation the TV world has to do their
stories justice. I hear several stories of painful, tone-deaf pitches from production
companies with no idea what a studio’s games were about. “One outfit put together a

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teaser for a proposed adaptation of The Last of Us that was this B-movie, slasher/horror
film,” says Straley. “It was so beyond their conception that a post-apocalyptic game could
generate genuine emotions.”

Admittedly, games have not always had the kind of stories or characters that provoke
reflection or empathy (has anyone ever thought much about the motivations of Doom’s
demon-killing supersoldier?). But these days they do – another reason, perhaps, that the
TV world is showing more interest. The challenge now for people making shows based on
games is not to wring a good script out of paper-thin plots; it’s to honour the genuine
emotional connection players feel when they’re in a character’s shoes, with a gamepad in
their hands.

“The awesomest thing and the hardest thing about games is the interactivity,” says Straley.
“It’s so powerful to be able to pull the player into a world and let them craft an experience
of their own. I truly believe that there’s a different mental wiring, and a different
connection, than when we sit in front of a TV. With this power comes a ton of problems for
developers. It’s one of the hardest mediums to work in, if you care about telling a quality
story, and if you really think about what it takes to make a good story in a game, it’s pretty
baffling that it ever works! But when it does, it’s pure magic.

“We have to ask ourselves: what’s the purpose of a game-to-screen adaptation? I don’t
want the lesser version of the game experience – I want something that introduces new
fans to what makes that game great.”

By Keza MacDonald for The Guardian.

Translation
Exercise 1

With the aid of an English–Portuguese dictionary, translate the text above into Portuguese.

Vocabulary
Exercise 1

Algumas palavras, locuções, expressões e trechos foram destacadas no texto por serem
relevantes para a compreensão de fundamentos da gramática inglesa ou por possuírem
particularidades linguísticas que merecem uma análise mais atenta. Você consegue
perceber quais são essas particularidades em cada um dos casos?

Exercise 2

Com o auxílio de um dicionário — e/ou mediante a própria análise do contexto —, escreva

1) definições e significados mais comuns de cada palavra ou expressão nova; 2) a tradução

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em português; 3) sinônimos em inglês; 4) antônimos em inglês (se houver); 5) uma frase
interessante que demonstra seu uso; 6) collocations habituais (se houver); e 7) variações
morfológicas (verbo, adjetivo, advérbio).

Use um caderno ou, de preferência, uma planilha no Excel ou Google Sheets como esta do
link (https://bit.ly/3ykZZ1F) para organizar as informações. A planilha, no longo prazo,
servirá como seu banco de vocabulário. Ignore, neste exercício, as palavras e expressões
que você já conhece.

Siga o modelo abaixo na construção da planilha:

truth: a fact or belief that is accepted as true | verdade | rightness, veracity | lie,
falsehood | She never tells the truth when it comes to her love life | absolute, naked,
plain, whole truth | truthful (adj.), true (adj.).

Reading Comprehension and First Phase Practice

Exercise 1

Briefly answer the questions below with your own words.

1. Why is the TV world suddenly so interested in shows based on games?

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2. Why do some game-to-movie adaptations fail to please the public?

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3. What are the main difficulties for adapting games to movies? What are the signals of a
successful adaptation?
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Exercise 2

Based on the text, judge every item below as C (right) or E (wrong). The answers will be
discussed in class.

Question #1
In accordance with the text, it can be deduced that.
( ) 1 - Video games adaptations to TV have always been successful.

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( ) 2 - Not one good video game to TV adaptation has been made recently.
( ) 3 - The majority of video games fans are teenagers.
( ) 4 - The boom of game adaptations can be attributed to a recent growth in the number
of video game players.

Question #2
Considering the information in the text, judge — right (C) or wrong (E) — the following
items.
( ) 1 - The video game industry is today as big as the cinema industry.
( ) 2 - The income level of the public is the most important piece of information to the
movie industry when considering whether a game is worth being adapted to a movie.
( ) 3 - There is no evidence that streaming companies are interested in investing in
games-to-movies adaptations.
( ) 4 - There are no relevant differences between writing a script for a game and one for a
movie.

Question #3
Considering the ideas and the vocabulary presented in the text, mark the following items
as right (C) or wrong (E).
( ) 1 - A demon-killing supersoldier (paragraph 12) is not a kind of demon that kills
supersoldiers.
( ) 2 - The opposite of “to be tone-deaf” is “to have perfect pitch” (paragraph 11).
( ) 3 - A slasher movie is generally a gory one.
( ) 4 - The phrase “without sticking rock-solid to the story” could be rewritten as “despite
being less rigid about the plot” without significantly altering the original idea of the
paragraph.

Question #4
As far as vocabulary is concerned, mark the following items as right (C) or wrong (E) as to
the use of “nonetheless” (paragraph 6).
( ) 1 - “Nonetheless” could be replaced by “Nevertheless” without altering the original
idea of the sentence.
( ) 2 - “Nonetheless” could be replaced by “Yet” without altering the original idea of the
sentence.
( ) 3 - “Nonetheless” could be replaced by “However” without altering the original idea of
the sentence.
( ) 4 - “Nonetheless” could be replaced by “Although” without altering the original idea
of the sentence.

Question #5
In the text, without altering the meaning of the sentence, the phrasal verb “picked up”
(from “...another game has been picked up” — paragraph 2) could be replaced by (mark
right — C — or wrong — E):
( ) 1 - chosen
( ) 2 - lifted up

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( ) 3 - selected
( ) 4 - considered

Question #6
Regarding the grammatical aspects of the text, mark the following items as right (C) or
wrong (E).
( ) 1 - The expression “to get greenlit” could be replaced by “to give the green light”
without any alteration in its meaning.
( ) 2 - In “Hollywood has managed to produce a few video-game films that are actually
watchable”, we could replace “are actually watchable” by “could even be watched” without
affecting the original idea of the sentence.
( ) 3 - We could rewrite “... the Netflix Resident Evil series that premieres in July” as “..the
Netflix Resident Evil series that will premiere in July” without significant changes in the
meaning of the sentence.
( ) 4 - One might rewrite “There ’s a much better chance they’ll make TV worth watching”
as “There is a much better chance that they are going to make TV worth watching” without
altering the original idea of the sentence.

Summary Practice | Prática do Resumo

Exercise 1

Summarise, ideally in just one sentence, the main idea or topic sentence of each
paragraph from the text. Try to use the structures and the vocabulary applied in the text.

1. ____________________________________________________________________________
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2. ____________________________________________________________________________
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3. ____________________________________________________________________________
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7. ____________________________________________________________________________
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8. ____________________________________________________________________________
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Exercise 2

Caso deseje solicitar uma correção personalizada de seu resumo deste texto, procure a
opção de contratação na aula correspondente a esta atividade.

Write a summary of the text above with your own words. The length of the summary must
be between 30% and 40% of that of the original text.

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 PART II · GRAMMAR
Verb Tenses

a) The Future

A construção do futuro, em inglês, é bastante simples. O futuro é formado, normalmente,

de três maneiras:

Usa-se will + verb para expressar um futuro provável, incerto ou vago.

Para expressar uma situação futura de maior certeza ou proximidade de ocorrer,

prefere-se a construção to be + going to + verb.

She is going to buy the entire list of books.

We are not (or aren't or We're not) going to study Law today.
I am going to see her tonight.
She'll (or she will) have to move to Brasilia when she becomes a diplomat.
I will not (or won't or I'll not) tell you my deepest secrets.
Will you love me forever?

Você também pode usar a estrutura do present progressive para expressar um futuro
programado:

We're having turkey for dinner. (ou We’re going to have turkey for dinner)

Em muitos casos, escolhe-se indiferentemente uma ou outra estrutura.

b) The Simple Present Tense

Para conjugar os verbos regulares no presente, na frase afirmativa, adicione a desinência

-s/-ies ao verbo na terceira pessoa do singular. Forma-se a estrutura negativa com don't
ou doesn't. Para a frase interrogativa, antepõe-se do ou does ao sujeito. Tanto na frase
interrogativa quanto na negativa, o verbo principal perde a desinência -s.

Affirmative:
I/you/we/they love books Negative: Interrogative:
he/she/it loves books I/you/we/they don't love Do I/you/we/they love
I/you/we/they study hard books books?
he/she/it studies hard he/she/it doesn't study Does he/she study hard?
hard

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Você consegue inferir por que study é flexionado como studies na terceira pessoa do
singular na frase afirmativa?

Alguns verbos são irregulares e conjugam-se de maneira diferente:

To be
Affirmative: To have
I am a diplomat Affirmative:
You/we/they are diplomats I/you/we/they have a red passport
He/she/it is a diplomat He/she/it has a red passport

Negative: Negative:
I am not a diplomat I/you/we/they don't have a red passport
You/we/they are not (aren't) diplomats He/she/it doesn't have a red passport
He/she/it is not (isn't) a diplomat
Interrogative:
Interrogative: Do I/you/we/they have a red passport?
Am I a diplomat? Does he/she/it have a red passport?
Are we diplomats?
Is she a diplomat?

c) Modal Auxiliary Verbs

Alguns verbos, chamados modais (can, may, must, should, would, ought to, might, could,
will, shall), mantêm a mesma forma (sem -s) em todas as pessoas, inclusive na terceira do
singular (he/she/it). Esses verbos são usados antes de outros verbos ou em respostas
curtas.

He must study hard to learn German fluently (must sem -s).

— "Would he accept a posting to Angola?" — "Yes, he would."

A frase interrogativa é construída pela anteposição do modal verb ao sujeito.

May I introduce myself?

A negativa se dá agregando-se -n't ao modal verb ou simplesmente sucedendo-o por not.

She mustn't (or must not) deny the fact that French is not a simple language.
You shouldn't (or should not) take advice from those who haven't accomplished anything.

Grammar Practice | Prática de Gramática

Exercise 1

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Fill in the gaps below with the correct form of the verb in brackets. Follow the cues.

1 We _________ (not · to like) our new boss because she _________________ (never · to
teach) us how to do things right when we ______________ (to make) mistakes.

2 My sister ________________ (to help) me whenever she _______ (to have) the time.

3 Juca _______________ (not · to know) how to tell jokes in as many languages as his
brother __________ (to do).

4 ____________________ (to know · you) what time ________ (to be · it)?

5 _____________________ (to call · she) you every day? Why ________________ (not · to tell
· you) her to write an email instead?

6 ____________________ (to have · she) a diplomatic passport?

Exercise 2

Rewrite the sentences below in accordance with each of the commands.

1 I rarely see her before I get to work.

- Change “I” for “She”;
- Change “I” for “You” and ask a question;
- Change “I” for “He” and ask a question;
- Write a negative sentence;
- Change “I” for “She” and write it in the negative form;
- Write the sentence in the future tense.

2 You really love what you do!

- Change “You” for “He”;
- Make it an interrogative sentence;
- Change “You” for “She” and write it in the negative form;
- Rewrite it in the future tense.

3 They may want to see me after what I did.

- Write it in the negative form;
- Change “They” for “She”;
- Change “may” for “will” and ask a question.

Further Practice
How English Works (Oxford)
Be, do & have: Pages 94–105.
Modal Auxiliary Verbs: Pages 106–129.

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Tenses · future: Pages 130–136.
Tenses · present: Pages 142–150.

English Grammar in Use (Cambridge)

Present: Chapters 1 and 2.
Future: Chapter 19–23.
Modals: Chapters 26–37.

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 PART III · ACCOUNTABILITY
Responda depois da aula. Observe suas anotações e marque abaixo as opções que se
aplicam aos resultados pedagógicos desta aula:

Alimentei consideravelmente meu banco de vocabulário.

Melhorei minha técnica de resumo de textos e identificação de ideias
principais/tópicos frasais.
Melhorei minhas competências de leitura, compreensão e interpretação de textos.
Aprendi os seguintes tópicos de gramática: verb tenses (simple present and the
future) & modal verbs.
Aprendi 20 novas palavras e/ou expressões idiomáticas.
Escreva abaixo aquelas palavras e/ou expressões idiomáticas aprendidas que
acredita que jamais esquecerá:
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Desenvolvi/melhorei minha competitividade nos exercícios de tradução para o
português.
Sinto-me um pouco mais competitivo(a) para a prova após a conclusão desta aula.

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