Leia o texto para responder a questão.

     When given the choice between a free meal and performing a task for a meal, cats would prefer the meal that doesn’t require much effort. While that might not come as a surprise to some cat lovers, it does to cat behaviorists. Most animals prefer to work for their food — a behavior called contrafreeloading.

    A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine showed most domestic cats choose not to contrafreeload. The study found that cats would rather eat from a tray of easily available food rather than work out a simple puzzle to get their food.

    “There is an entire body of research that shows that most species including birds, rodents, wolves, primates — even giraffes — prefer to work for their food,” said lead author Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and research affiliate at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

    In the study, Delgado, along with co-authors Melissa Bain and Brandon Han, provided 17 cats a food puzzle and a tray of food. The puzzle allowed the cats to easily see the food but required some manipulation to extract it. Some of the cats even had food puzzle experience.

    “It wasn’t that cats never used the food puzzle, but cats ate more food from the tray, spent more time at the tray and made more first choices to approach and eat from the tray rather than the puzzle,” said Delgado.

(www.neurosciencenews.com, 14.08.2021. Adaptado.)

Read the text and answer question.

All of me

John Legend

‘Cause all of me
Loves all of you
Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections
Give your all to me
I’ll give my all to you
You’re my end and my beginning
Even when I lose I’m winning
‘Cause I give you all of me
And you give me all of you 

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

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.)

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.

I Like the Bus (Julie Beck, JULY 24, 2015)

     As a traveler, my competitive advantage is laziness. I truly do not mind sitting still in one spot for hours with nothing to do but read or listen to music. In fact, those are three of my favorite things—music, reading, sitting. And I cherish when circumstances give me an excuse to spend my time that way, rather than worrying that I could be being more active, or productive. Because I am doing something productive—I’m going somewhere.

    This sort of me-time can be achieved on many forms of transportation—planes, trains, and automobiles (ones I’m not driving anyway) but the one I most enjoy is the bus. I like the city bus—especially as opposed to the subway, how it takes you through the streets instead of below them—and I like the long-distance bus. The bus to me is a meditative space, a safe place, a bubble out of time and away from life that moves me gently from one place to another.

    I have to fly to visit my family. The bus is better. It’s cheaper. You can bring liquids. There’s no security. You just get on, and get off. The cost is more one of time (though depending where you’re going, if you factor in the time you spend getting to the airport and going through security, you may end up breaking even). And it’s time, I think, worth spending. The more efficiently we use our time, the more demands are placed on our time. There’s something to be said for a forced slowdown.

    Going somewhere is an act. And there’s a pace at which I can fully take in the act of going somewhere and it’s not 500 miles per hour. A driving pace seems a good compromise. The scenery might blur around you, but you're still touching the ground.

(From: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/i-like-the-bus/399518/. Adapted.)

Based on the text below, answer question.

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)