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Questões de Inglês - Grammar
Questão 48 275944
FMJ Caderno 2 2018Leia o texto para responder à questão.
The hunger gains: extreme calorie-restriction diet shows anti-aging results
The idea that organisms can live longer, healthier lives by sharply reducing their calorie intake is not exactly new. Laboratory research has repeatedly demonstrated the anti- -aging value of calorie restriction, often called CR, in animals from nematodes to rats – with the implication that the same might be true for humans.
In practice though, permanently reducing calorie intake by 25 to 50 percent or more sounds to many like a way to extend life by making it not worth living. Researchers have also warned that what works for nematodes or rats may not work – and could even prove dangerous – in humans, by causing muscle or bone density loss, for example.
But now two new studies appear to move calorie restriction from the realm of wishful thinking to the brink of practical, and perhaps even tolerable, reality. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Wisconsin- -Madison and the National Institute on Aging reported last month chronic calorie restriction produces significant health benefits in rhesus monkeys – a primate with humanlike aging patterns – indicating “that CR mechanisms are likely translatable to human health.” The researchers describe one monkey they started on a 30 percent calorie restriction diet when he was 16 years old, late middle age for this type of animal. He is now 43, a longevity record for the species, according to the study, and the equivalent of a human living to 130.
In the second study, published in Science Translational Medicine, a research team led by gerontologist Valter Longo at the University of Southern California (U.S.C.) suggests it is possible to gain anti-aging benefits without signing up for a lifetime of hunger. Instead, a “fasting-mimicking diet,” practiced just five days a month for three months – and repeated at intervals as needed – is “safe, feasible and effective in reducing risk factors for aging and age-related diseases.”
Some researchers, however, still find the calorie-restriction argument unpersuasive. Leslie Robert, a biochemist and physician at the University of Paris who was not involved in the two new studies, says pharmaceutical approaches offer greater anti-aging potential than “inefficient and apparently harmful” diets. The important thing, adds Luigi Fontana, a longevity researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis who also was not involved in the new work, is “if you’re doing a healthy diet, exercising, everything good, without doing anything extreme, without making life miserable by counting every single calorie.”
(Richard Conniff. www.scientificamerican.com, 16.02.2017. Adaptado.)
No trecho do quarto parágrafo “Instead, a ‘fasting-mimicking diet,’”, o termo em destaque equivale, em português, a
Questão 15 151602
FMP 2017THE BRAIN
The brain controls all the body’s functions – from
consciousness and heart rate to thinking, memory
and emotion. It is the most complex thing we know of,
and the gaps in our knowledge about how it works are
vast. Neuroscientists have the daunting job of making
sense of this complicated organ – to provide insights
into our minds and behaviour and to find ways to
tackle debilitating brain diseases and injuries. Brain
injuries can occur in many ways, such as through
accidents, stroke or infections. The rehabilitation
group at the Medical Research Council Cognition
and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge specialises
in helping people with brain injuries to compensate
for cognitive problems and to cope with everyday life.
Its work includes developing new ways to measure
the problems faced by people with brain injuries and
developing new treatments. The scientists are also
interested in finding out more about how people
recover from brain injury and related memory loss.
The brain stem controls our core body functions –
the things our body must do unconsciously to keep us
alive, such as altering our heart beat and regulating
our blood pressure and body temperature. It also
controls functions such as alertness, swallowing,
digestion and breathing.
Consciousness is part of what makes each of us
unique. It encompasses many of our ideas, thoughts,
feelings, plans and memories. Conscious thought is
different from the unconscious workings of the brain
– which enable us to breathe, walk and talk and our
hearts to beat automatically. There are two aspects to
consciousness: awareness and wakefulness.
— Awareness refers to our internal, subjective
experience. It includes self awareness – the ability to
understand that you exist, as an individual, separate
from other people and with private thoughts. It also
includes awareness of the relationship between
oneself and one’s environment through use of our
senses and by thinking about ideas and acting upon
them using judgement.
— Wakefulness refers to different levels of
conscious awareness. Each day we experience a
spectrum of wakefulness, from full attentiveness, such
as if we are involved in an interesting conversation,
through inattentiveness, drowsiness and normal
sleep. Following some types of brain injury or during
anaesthesia people can’t be woken: they have a lower
level of wakefulness. Brain death lies at the far end of
this spectrum.
These two aspects of consciousness normally go
hand-in-hand; we don’t expect to have an interesting
conversation with someone who is asleep. However,
we can possess awareness when we are asleep, for
example when we dream.
Where does consciousness come from?
Scientists have amassed much evidence linking
different aspects of consciousness to our brain. We
now know that consciousness requires many parts of
the brain to work together. Parts of the cerebral cortex
act together to produce our thoughts and experiences.
A functioning thalamus is also required to produce
wakefulness – we know this because if a part of the
thalamus called the centromedian nucleus becomes
damaged, we become unconscious.
Unconsciousness can also be caused by
anaesthesia, or changes to the body’s internal
environment such as a rise or drop in core body
temperature or a lack of oxygen. A prolonged period
of unconsciousness is known as a coma. Sometimes,
after a severe brain injury, a person can enter a
vegetative state (VS). Unlike coma patients, VS
patients show normal wake/sleep cycles, but even
when they are awake they show no external sign of
awareness. When all electrical activity in the brain
stops irreversibly, this is known as brain death.
Scientists at the MRC Cognition and Brain
Sciences Unit in Cambridge study patients with
disorders of consciousness. Their work recently
revealed that a woman who was diagnosed as
being in a persistent vegetative state following
a car accident was aware of her surroundings.
Working with colleagues in Belgium, the scientists
used functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) to map the woman’s brain activity. She was
physically unresponsive and fulfilled all the criteria
for a diagnosis of vegetative state according to
international guidelines. But scans showed that her
brain responded to speech. Her brain also actively
processed the meaning of sentences, becoming
more active when she heard sentences containing
words with several meanings, like ‘rain’ and ‘reign’.
When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving
around her home, brain scans showed that the
woman could do this, activating various areas of her
brain in the same way as healthy volunteers. “These
are startling results. They confirm that, despite the
diagnosis of vegetative state, this patient retained
the ability to understand spoken commands and
to respond to them through her brain activity,” said
one of the researchers. “Her decision to work with
us represents a clear act of intent which confirmed
beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of
herself and her surroundings.”
Doctors use different levels of sedation to reduce
people’s awareness of their bodies and surroundings.
For example, high levels of anaesthetic drugs cause
general anaesthesia: a complete loss of consciousness.
Another team of scientists at the MRC Cognition and
Brain Sciences Unit used fMRI to study how sedation
affects the brain’s processing of speech. Working with
researchers at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in
Cambridge, they found that during heavy sedation,
volunteers’ brains still responded to the sounds of
speech but they were unable to process or remember
it. The findings have important implications for the care
of patients undergoing general anaesthesia or coming
out of a coma.
Available at: <http://www.mrc.ac.uk/publications/browse/the-brain-mrc- -research-for-lifelong-health/>. Retrieved on: 28 June 2016. Adapted.
In the fragment “we don’t expect to have an interesting conversation with someone who is asleep. However, we can possess awareness when we are asleep” (lines 51-53), the word However is associated with the idea of
Questão 28 1470032
UNESP 2020Leia o texto sobre uma exposição no museu Tate Modern, em Londres, para responder à questão.
Tate Modern – London
Hélio Oiticica
Until Summer 2019
Tropicália
Tropicália is used to describe the explosion of cultural creativity in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1968 as Brazil’s military regime tightened its grip on power.
Many of the artists, writers and musicians associated with Tropicália came of age during the 1950s in a time of intense optimism when the cultural world had been encouraged to play a central role in the creation of a democratic, socially just and modern Brazil. Nevertheless, a military coup in 1964 had brought to power a right-wing regime at odds with the concerns of left-wing artists. Tropicália became a way of exposing the contradictions of modernisation under such an authoritarian rule.
The word Tropicália comes from an installation by the artist Hélio Oiticica, who created environments that were designed to encourage the viewer’s emotional and intellectual participation. Oiticica called them “penetrables” because people were originally encouraged to enter them. They mimic the improvised, colourful dwellings in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or shanty towns. The lush plants and sand help to convey a sense of the tropical character of the city. When Oiticica exhibited the work, he also included live parrots.
From its beginning, Tropicália was seen as a re-articulation of Anthropophagia (“cannibalism”), an artistic ideology promoted by Oswald de Andrade.
(www.tate.org.uk. Adaptado.)
No trecho do segundo parágrafo “Nevertheless, a military coup in 1964”, o termo sublinhado indica
Questão 19 6549947
FACISB 2020Read the text to answer question.
Escaping from destruction
Almost 80 years ago Snowdonia, a mountainous region in northwestern Wales, United Kingdom, prepared to keep a welcome in the hillside for some of the world’s most treasured paintings. Across Europe the advancing Nazis had already looted or destroyed millions of pounds worth of art. As bombs fell on London and a German invasion seemed inevitable, attention turned to how to protect the National Gallery’s collection. In 1940, Winston Churchill famously said of the nation’s art treasures: “Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island.”
Experts scoured the UK for a hiding place — until they found Manod Quarry. Manod Mountain had been a working quarry1 for over a century. Its excavations created a cavernous space at the heart of the mountain, and covered with hundreds of feet of slate and granite it was virtually impregnable to bombing. Also, its very remoteness made it easier to keep the mission top secret.
Suzanne Bosman, author of The National Gallery in Wartime, explains that moving almost 2,000 works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Turner proved to be quite an undertaking. “Cold, damp quarries aren’t really good storage places for priceless works of art, so before they were moved in, six air-tight climate-controlled brick huts were built inside the mountain,” she explained. “In fact the conditions in which they were stored at Manod were considerably better than those in which they were exhibited at the National Gallery before the war, and the evacuation taught staff a lot about preservation, even after the war”, says Bosman.
The largest paintings were packed in specially designed “elephant cases” and transported by road. The smaller paintings were transported in Post Office vans and delivery trucks in order to avoid attracting attention. However, Ms Bosman said, it did not always run that smoothly. “Van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles I is a monster, at 12ft by 9.5ft, and in its case, loaded on the back of the truck, it was considerably taller. On the approach to the quarry there is a tight S-bend, just where the road passes under the arch of a railway bridge. I liken it to trying to get a sofa around a corner on the stairs; there was enough height, but only if you could hit precisely the right angle.”
Nowadays the quarry is in a poor state of repair and access is strictly controlled. Inside you can still see the marks on the wall where the paintings hung, and the floor is littered with the hygrometers and thermometers which would have controlled every aspect of the conditions. It’s such a shame that very few people will get to see it in the future. We’ve let a piece of our national heritage slip away.
(This article was inspired by a question from reader Doug Cormack who got
in touch to ask how the National Gallery’s collection came to be evacuated
to Wales during the war, and whether the paintings would ever come back
to Wales for a commemorative exhibition.)
(Neil Prior. www.bbc.com, 19.05.2019. Adaptado.)
1quarry: an open excavation, usually for obtaining building material.
In the fragment from the fourth paragraph “I liken it to trying to get a sofa around a corner on the stairs; there was enough height, but only if you could hit precisely the right angle”, the underlined term could be correctly replaced, without any change in meaning, by
Questão 13 211564
FAMERP 2018Can plants hear?
Flora may be able to detect the sounds of flowing water or munching insects
Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.
In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y. One arm of each pot was placed in either a tray of water or a coiled plastic tube through which water flowed; the other arm had dry soil. The roots grew toward the arm of the pipe with the fluid, regardless of whether it was easily accessible or hidden inside the tubing. “They just knew the water was there, even if the only thing to detect was the sound of it flowing inside the pipe,” Gagliano says. Yet when the seedlings were given a choice between the water tube and some moistened soil, their roots favored the latter. She hypothesizes that these plants use sound waves to detect water at a distance but follow moisture gradients to home in on their target when it is closer.
The research, reported earlier this year in Oecologia, is not the first to suggest flora can detect and interpret sounds. A 2014 study showed the rock cress Arabidopsis can distinguish between caterpillar chewing sounds and wind vibrations – the plant produced more chemical toxins after “hearing” a recording of feeding insects. “We tend to underestimate plants because their responses are usually less visible to us. But leaves turn out to be extremely sensitive vibration detectors,” says lead study author Heidi M. Appel, an environmental scientist now at the University of Toledo.
(Marta Zaraska. www.scientificamerican.com, 17.05.2017.)
In the excerpt from the second paragraph “Yet when the seedlings”, the word “yet” indicates
Questão 48 678099
FIP-Moc Medicina 2018/2
The verb “to flee” can be replaced by:
