Questões de Inglês - Grammar

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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.)

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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

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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.

Psychopaths can’t tell if a person is genuinely sad or afraid, study suggests

People with psychopathic traits find it harder to tell the difference between genuine and fake emotions, a
study has suggested.
Researchers based in Australia arrived at this conclusion by asking people to look at photographs of faces
showing different emotions, such as fear or sadness.
[5] Study author Dr. Amy Dawel, of the Australian National University Research School of Psychology,
explained in a statement: “For most people, if we see someone who is genuinely upset, you feel bad for
them and it motivates you to help them. People who are very high on the psychopathy spectrum don’t show
this response.”
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by amoral behavior, such as callousness, poor empathy
[10] skills and shallow affect: — the inability to experience deep emotions even when in scenarios where the
average person might be distressed. They might lack remorse or guilt in appropriate situations, and have a
disregard for social conventions and law. Balancing this is their superficial charm and ability to mimic
emotional behavior, which can help them function in society. Patrick Bateman, the murderous Wall Street
banker in American Psycho, is one of the most famous fictional depictions of psychopathy.

[15]    The team behind the study published in the journal Personality Disorders recruited 140 participants, and
tested them for psychopathic traits. They were also shown photos of facial expressions. In some images, the
emotions where genuine, while others were faked.
Those who scored low on the psychopathy report were better able to pick up genuine and fabricated
emotions. The higher a participant scored, the harder they found it to differentiate between genuine and fake
[20] feelings of sadness or fear. They could, however, detect genuine happiness, anger, and disgust.
“The results were very specific to expressions of distress,” said Dawel. “We found people with high levels
of psychopathic traits don’t feel any worse for someone who is genuinely upset than someone who is faking
it.”
 “They also seem to have problems telling if the upset is real or fake. As a result, they are not nearly as
[25] willing to help someone who is expressing genuine distress as most people are.”
The researchers hope their paper will form the basis of further work into pinpointing and treat psychopathy,
particularly by identifying it in childhood.
“There seems to be a genetic contribution to these traits, we see the start of them quite early in childhood,”
said Dawel.
[30] “Understanding exactly what is going wrong with emotions in psychopathy will help us to identify these
problems early and hopefully intervene in ways that promote moral development.”
The research is the latest to delve into psychopathic traits. Last year, Harvard University researchers
published the results of a study into almost 50 prisoners. They found the brains of those with psychopathic
traits were wired to value immediate reward, while not considering long-term consequences.
[35] Commenting on the paper published in Neuron, study author Josh Buckholtz, associate professor of
psychology at Harvard University, said in a statement: “For years, we have been focused on the idea that
psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that’s why they do all these terrible things.
“But what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don’t have, it’s the choices they
make. Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims
[40] and astronomically costly to society as a whole.”

Fonte: GANDER, Kashmira. Psychopaths can’t tell if a person is genuinely sad or afraid, study sugests. Disponível em: http://www.newsweek.com/psychopaths-cant-tell-if-person-genuinely-sad-or-afraid-study suggests-1055599. Publicado em: 8 março 2018. Acesso em: 14 out. 2018.

Britain bans gasoline and diesel cars starting in 2040

  Britain will ban sales of new gasoline and diesel cars starting in 2040 as part of a bid to clean up the country’s air. The decision to phase out the internal combustion engine heralds a new era of low-emission technologies with major implications for the auto industry, society and the environment. “We can’t carry on with diesel and petrol cars”, U.K. environment secretary Michael Gove told the BBC on Wednesday. “There is no alternative to embracing new technology”. Almost 2.7 million new cars were registered in the U.K. in 2016, making it the second biggest market in Europe after Germany. 

  Meeting the 2040 deadline will be a heavy lift. British demand for electric and fuel cell cars, as well as plug-in hybrids, grew 40% in 2015, but they only accounted for less than 3% of the market. Still, experts say sales of clean cars are likely to continue on their dramatic upward trajectory.

  The car industry says that demand for electric vehicles will only reach a tipping point once they're cheaper to own than conventional vehicles.

  The deadline was announced by the government on Wednesday as part of a plan to reduce air pollution. The blueprint highlighted roughly £1.4 billion in government investment designed to help ensure that every vehicle on the road in Britain produces zero emissions by 2050. 

  Gove said action was needed because gasoline and diesel engines contribute to health problems, “accelerate climate change, do damage to the planet and the next generation”. Roughly 40,000 deaths in Britain each year are attributable to outdoor air pollution, according to a study published last year by the Royal College of Physicians. Dirty air has been linked to cancer, asthma, stroke and heart disease, among other health issues. 

  The problem is especially pronounced in big cities. London surpassed the European Union’s annual limit for nitrogen dioxide exposure just five days into the new year, according to King’s College. The university estimates that air pollution is responsible for 9,400 premature deaths in the city every year. 

  The timeline for ending sales of internal combustion engines mirrors one proposed in early July by France. President Emmanuel Macron has given the auto industry the same deadline to make the switch to cleaner tech.

  “We are quite rightly in a position of global leadership when it comes to shaping new technology”, Gove said. But the auto industry, which supports over 800,000 jobs in the U.K., is wary of hard deadlines.

  Other countries have been even more ambitious than the U.K. India is planning to stop selling gas-powered vehicles by 2030.

  The German car industry and government officials will meet in early August to discuss the future of diesel engine technology. Manufacturers are trying to avoid diesel cars being banned from German towns and cities. 

(Disponível: . Adaptado. Acesso: 26 de julho de 2017.)