Questões de Inglês - Grammar

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The Future of Libraries Has Little to Do with Books

    On a Monday morning between Christmas and New Year's Eve in Paris, the line for modern art museum Centre Georges Pompidou winds around the block. But the patrons waiting in the cold aren't there to catch a aqlimpse of a Magritte –they're young locais  queueing for access through the museum's back door to another attraction: the public library.

    In a digital age that has left book publishers reeling, libraries in the world's major cities seem poised for a comeback, though it's one that has very little to do with books. The Independent Library Report – published in December by the U.K.'s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport – found that libraries across the nation are reinventing themselves by increasingly becoming "vibrant and attractive community hubs", focusing on the "need to create digital literacy, and in an ideal world, digital fluency."

    Taking into account the proliferation of freelancing, the gig economy, and remote working (also known as 'technomadism'), the rise of library as community hub begins to make sense. Cities are increasingly attracting location independent workers, and those workers need space and amenities that expensive and unreliable coffee shops simply cannot provide enough of.

    Furthermore, when one  considers that the most vulnerable and underserved city dwellers are also those who generaliy do not have access to the Internet, the need for a free and publicly connected space becomes even clearer.

    According to a 2013 Pew poll, 90 percent in the U.s. said their community would be negatively impacted if their local library closed. But if libraries are going to survive the digital age, they need to be more about helping patrons filter vast quantities of digital information rather than access to analog materials. Good news came for U.s. libraries in November, when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a 62 percent increase in spending on high-speed Internet for schools and public libraries.

    When it comes to this need for connectivity, Britain's library report stated a "Wi-Fi connection should be delivered in a comfortable, retail standard environment with the usual amenities of coffee, sofas and etc." The report suggested that libraries focus less on loaning physical books and more on widening access via loaning of e-books, which the report noted was up by 80 percent in Britain from 2013.

    Also in 2013, the first bookless public library in the United States opened in san Antonio, Texas. The city's BiblioTech offers an all-digital, cloud-based collection of more than 10,000 e-books, plus e-readers available for checkout. Located in San Antonio's underserved South Side, the BiblioTech provides an important digital hub in a city with a population that still struggles to connect to wireless Internet. Last month saw the opening of Canada'!s Halifax Central Library, designed by a world-leading Danish design firm. With its auditorium, meeting space for entrepreneurs, multiple cafes, adult literacy classes and gaming facilities, actual books seemed like an afterthought.

(Abridged from http://magazine.good.is/articles/public-libraries-reimagined)

Walk-to-burn-calorie menu 'diet aid'
By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC
News online
24 April 2013 Last updated at 10:03 GMT

“A quarter-pound double cheeseburger takes a woman about two hours to walk off and a man slightly less”

Menus displaying the exercise needed to burn calories in meals can help people consume less, a US study suggests.

Diners given this extra information ordered and ate less calorific food than other customers, a team at Texas Christian University found.
Knowing it takes two hours of brisk walking to burn off a cheeseburger may be more of a warning than being told how many calories it contains, the researchers say. They now plan larger trials.
Researchers Dr Meena Shah and Ashlei James divided 300 volunteers aged 18 to 30 randomly into three groups.
One received a menu without any calorie information, another menus with the calories displayed, and the third menus that showed both calories and the amount of exercise needed to burn them off. All of the menus offered the same choice of food and drink, which included burgers, sandwiches, salad, chips, soft drinks and water.

None of the volunteers was aware of the reason for the study and the researchers took into account hunger levels when interpreting their findings. The group given the menus with the extra information about how much brisk walking would be needed to burn off the food ordered and ate much less than the group who had menus with no calorie information.

They consumed 100 fewer calories, on average, as a result. Dr Shah said: "This is the first study to look at the effects of displaying minutes of brisk walking needed to burn food calories on the calories ordered and consumed.

"This study suggests there are benefits."The researchers say brisk walking is something nearly everyone can relate to.

Calorie counting

"We can't generalize to a population over age 30, so we will further investigate this in an older and more diverse group," Dr Shah added.

They will present their findings at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting in Boston.

Victoria Taylor, senior dietician at the British Heart Foundation, said clearly sign posting healthy options and nutritional content helped people make informed choices when ordering food.But she added: "While displaying the amount of exercise needed to burn calories is an interesting idea, there's more to a hearthealthy diet than calorie counting.

"Restaurants can also take steps to make meals healthier by serving appropriate portion sizes and reducing the amount of salt, saturated fatand sugar in their dishes.

"Whether eating at home or dining out, a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and veg is the best way to protect your heart."

Fonte: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health - Acessado em Abril de 2013

The following text refers to question.

BBC News
Published July 11, 2021.

How flooded coal mines could heat homes

    Coal mines were the beating heart of Britain's industrial revolution. Their sooty, energy-dense output gave life to new-fangled factories and shipyards, fueling the nation's march towards modernity. They helped shape a carbon-intensive economy, one that took little notice of the natural world around it. The mines paved the way for a global dependence on fossil fuels, and in doing so, fired the starting pistol on the climate crisis that today confronts us all.

    But what if, in a serendipitous circle of history, our extractive past could be repurposed for a greener, cleaner future? What if the vast maze of coal mines beneath our feet, now filled with naturally warm water, could help decarbonize the UK's – and the world's – herculean heating needs?

    That's the question Adam Black, a renewable energy enthusiast employed by one of Britain's largest bottling firms, asked himself a decade ago. "I had about 400,000 sq ft [37,000 sq m] of warehouse that needed heating," says the director of energy projects at Durham-based Lanchester Wines. "And it was right over four layers of mine workings, which had naturally flooded over time."]

    With the help of a few geothermal experts from Iceland, Black sunk a borehole into the murky depths of the old High Main coal seam in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England. Warmed by natural geological processes, the water they pumped to the surface was a pleasant 15 oC (59 ºF).

    With a little supplemental warmth from an electrical heat pump – "a bit like a fridge in reverse" – it was perfect for keeping the company's warehouse, and the millions of wine bottles within, at the right temperature.

    (Adaptado de BBC News Future. Disponível em: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210706-how-flooded-coal-mines-could-heat-homes#:~:text= It%20is%20estimated%20that%20around,the%20potential%20to%20store%20more.&text=Once%20its%20heat%20has%20been,will%20be%20warmed%20 up%20again.)

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The fantastic appeal of fantasy

The fantasy genre starts where science ends

    Few things can brighten up a dark morning in a Scottish seaside resort during an Atlantic storm. Yet while sheltering in a bookshop from the rain, I had a moment of sunny revelation. Stacked almost as high as my 11-year-old self were copies of The Lord of the Rings, with a cover illustration that promised mystery and magic. That chance discovery started a lifelong love of the fantasy genre¹, both as reader and writer.

    The fantasy genre has had more and more success, but today we’re in the middle of an unprecedented fantasy boom. Sales continue to rise and it is now the biggest genre in publishing. The more rational the world gets, with super-science all around us, the more we demand the irrational in our fiction.

    Fantasy is not simply a case of swords² and sorcery³. Yes, there is that by the shelf. But the genre is as broad as the imagination. The genre starts where science ends.

    “In these modern times, where most of us sit at computers, fantasy books offer a chance to break out of mundane moments,” says Mark Newton, an editor with the genre. “People like to explore themes that go beyond the limited palette that literary fiction claims to offer.”

    A search for the origins of fantasy will usually have academics muttering about Beowulf or Homer’s The Iliad, but they come from a time when all stories were fantasy: gods and monsters and supernatural artefacts with humanity caught in the middle. The first modern fantasy writer is usually considered to be William Morris, in the late 19th Century. But it was the early 20th Century where fantasy really started to gain status.

    Fantasy fiction has always been about visionary ideas. You can get artful words in plenty of literary fiction, but being able to see beyond the boundaries⁴ of the world around us — now that’s a special skill.

    I don’t write fantasy fiction simply to provide a trapdoor⁵ from the real world. For me, the genre is about the reality. But instead of coming up against it, fantasy maps the unconscious aspirations of our modern society through allegory in story- -forms as old as humanity. It’s about turning off the mobile phone and the computer and remembering who we are in the deepest parts of ourselves.

(Mark Chadbourn. www.telegraph.co.uk, 12.04.2008. Adaptado.)

¹genre: gênero. Categoria distintiva de composição literária, como romance, poesia etc.
²sword: espada.
³sorcery: feitiçaria.
⁴boundary: fronteira.
⁵trapdoor: alçapão.

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Widespread testing begins on malaria vaccine

Mothers wait for their children to be vaccinated against malaria at the start of a pilot program at Mitundu Community Hospital, in Lilongwe, Malawi, on April 23, 2019.

    With malaria deaths rebounding worldwide, a pilot program testing a new and fiercely debated malaria vaccine began on Tuesday in Malawi. Dr. Katherine O’Brien, the World Health Organization’s director of immunization, called the rollout “a historic moment in the fight against malaria,” and said the testing will soon expand to malarious regions of Ghana and Kenya. But the vaccine, known as RTS,S, or Mosquirix, has been in development for more than 30 years, and it has serious drawbacks that have led some experts to argue that it does not work well enough to spend millions of dollars pursuing.

    Malaria kills about 450,000 people a year, most of them young African children. Over the last 15 years, the death rate has been reduced by more than half through extensive, donor-funded efforts to hand out free mosquito nets, spray homes with insecticide and treat people with a new generation of medicines. Nevertheless, deaths have increased again as money has run short, populations have grown, resistance to some new drugs has emerged and mosquitoes have expanded their ranges. Finding new weapons is crucial, experts agree, but making a malaria vaccine has proved challenging in the extreme.

    The new vaccine has many weaknesses. It is inconvenient: a child must receive four injections before age 2, sometimes at intervals that do not match the routine vaccine schedules for most other diseases. And it is only partly effective. Testing in more than 10,000 African children from 2009 to 2014 showed that, even after four doses, the vaccine prevented only about 40 percent of detectable malaria infections. The vaccine reduced the occurrence of severe malaria by about 30 percent. It did not protect well against parasite strains that were poor genetic matches, raising a concern that, over time, parasites could evolve resistance to the vaccine as they have to drugs.

(Donald G. McNeil Jr. www.nytimes.com, 24.04.2019. Adaptado.)