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.)

TEXTO:

    While virtually all activity, from yoga to sleeping,
requires energy, studies suggest vigorous exercise is
especially effective at burning calories. Seems obvious,
right? But it’s not just during exercise, it’s for hours after
[5] it’s concluded. And that’s where things get interesting.
    The so-called “afterburn effect” is more officially
known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or
simply, EPOC. And it isn’t new in the world of
fitness. Several studies suggest there’s a strong
[10] correlation between the number of calories burned post
exercise and the activity’s intensity. Simply put: The
more intense the exercise, the more oxygen your body
consumes afterward.
    In one study conducted with participants who
[15] had metabolic syndrome, EPOC also had significant
positive effects—meaning this type of training could be
especially useful in combating certain health issues,
like obesity and diabetes.
    And while one study showed that your afterburn
[20] will increase significantly with duration (i.e. the longer
and more intense your workout, the more you’ll burn),
you don’t necessarily have to work out for a long time
to stimulate the effect.That’s where short, high-intensity
workouts come into play. For example, training protocols
[25] like Tabata, where 20 seconds of all-out effort is followed
by 10 seconds of rest, are one way to trigger the
afterburn; other high-intensity interval workouts
(or HIIT routines) can also get you there. The key with
any of these programs is that you need to be working
[30] hard.
    And you don’t need to stick to traditional cardio in
order to achieve an EPOC effect. Several studies have
shown that weight training with various types of
equipment can also elicit elevated EPOC—and may
[35] even be more effective than cardio training in certain
scenarios. But keep in mind: You shouldn’t engage in
this style of training more than about two to three times
per week on non-consecutive days.

TAO, David. Disponível em: https://greatist.com/fitness/afterburneffect-keep-burning-calories-after-workout. Acesso: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

    Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
    Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
    Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
    Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

(Matt McGrath. www.bbc.com, 26.06.2018. Adaptado.)

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America’s social-media addiction is getting worse

Logging on: United States, social-media usage, by site

    A survey in January and February 2019 from the Pew Research Centre, a think tank, found that 69% of American adults use Facebook; of these users, more than half visit the site “several times a day”. YouTube is even more popular, with 73% of adults saying they watch videos on the platform. For those aged 18 to 24, the figure is 90%. Instagram, a photo-sharing app, is used by 37% of adults. When Pew first conducted the survey in 2012, only a slim majority of Americans used Facebook. Fewer than one in ten had an Instagram account.

    Americans are also spending more time than ever on social-media sites like Facebook. There is evidence that limiting such services might yield health benefits. A paper published last year by Melissa Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson and Jordyn Young, all of the University of Pennsylvania, found that limiting social-media usage to 10 minutes a day led to reductions in loneliness, depression, anxiety and fear. Another paper from 2014 identified a link between heavy social-media usage and depression, largely due to a “social comparison” phenomenon, whereby users compare themselves to others and come away with lower evaluations of themselves.

(www.economist.com, 08.08.2019. Adaptado.)

TEXTO:

                
    When Sudan, the last northern white rhino bull, died
in March 2018, that left alive only two females of
the subspecies once common in Central and East
Africa.Both are descendants of Sudan and live in Kenya,
[5] and were considered infertile. But now, new hope is
emerging that extinction of the species can still be
prevented. Researchers have successfully created living
embryos in the laboratory from frozen sperm of the
northern white rhinoceros and egg cells from the southern
[10] white rhinoceros. It’s the most closely related
subspecies, with more than 20,000 southern rhinos living
in the wild.
    Although such hybrid embryos are not pure northern
white rhinoceros, the researchers are optimistic. They
[15] plan to take egg cells from the still living northern
rhinoceros females in autumn of this year, and to fertilize
them with stored sperm from the same species.They
then intend to implant the oocytes into fertile southern
rhinoceros females in early 2019. This method is also
[20] used in human reproductive medicine.
    Even if healthy rhinoceros calves can be
produced, whether the northern white rhino can be saved
in the long term remains unclear. As the sperm comes
from a few rhinoceros bulls, limited genetic diversity could
[25] endanger the health of a newly bred northern white rhino
population. Due to the smaller gene pool, such inbreeding
typically leads to higher rates of recessive disorders,
translating into higher death rates and poorer overall
health.
[30]    Still, the research unit is hoping that stem cell
technology can create more eggs and sperm from the
skin cells of 12 northern whites, increasing the supply
and genetic variety. If the scientists pull it off, they’ll
both rescue a seemingly doomed animal and provide a
[35] blueprint for protecting other animals teetering on the
edge of oblivion.

WHEN SUDAN...Disponível em: https://www.dw.com/en/researcherscreate-hybrid-northern-white-rhino-embryos/a-44527410. Acesso em: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.