Questões de Inglês - Grammar

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Internet celebrities in Asia: from behind the screens

    As darkness falls over Taipei City, an image of a woman illuminates the night sky. She’s one of Taiwan’s most famous live streamers, a niche group of celebrities who earn their fame through front-facing video cameras. Her face beams from a 100-foot-tall billboard overlooking Taipei. Across Asia, countless other live streamers joke, eat, and sleep while being watched by thousands on smart phones and computer screens. The most successful among them can make fortunes enough to buy their own islands.

    After a long day’s work, Junji Chen treasures time spent gazing into the eyes of his personal favorite, Yutong. Having moved away from his village to work in Taipei, the 42-year-old has little social life. Most of his relationships are with Facebook friends, many of whom he has never met in person — and with live streamers.

    Yutong cannot see Chen or hear his voice but, to him, their connection feels raw, real, maybe even reciprocated. In the comment’s section, he can flatter her with compliments or send her money in the form of virtual stickers. One sticker can cost thousands of dollars, a steep price for a factory worker. But for lonely viewers like Junji, who spends a third of his salary on virtual stickers, the companionship is worth it.

    A streamer’s job can cause physical and mental harm. Peak hours are late at night, meaning irregular sleep schedules and fatigue. Some become isolated from friends and family or grow depressed. In Korea, live streamers who eat large quantities of food in front of the camera — known as Mukbang — are prone to obesity. Because a live streamer’s success depends on their digital popularity, they may continue unhealthy behaviors to please their fans. Once intimacy is lost, so is their source of income — even though, financially, few can live off the industry alone.

    Live streaming fans can manifest “parasocial relationships,” one-sided friendships that appear reciprocated, with their favorite live streamers. For a person who lacks social skills, parasocial relationships can create the illusion of companionship when, in reality, the other person offers them little or nothing in return.

    Fans believe that they are truly cared for, says Jerome Gence, who photographed live streamers and their fans throughout Asia, but “in the end, [the live streamer] just takes the money and the fan ends up even more lonely than before.” Still, he adds, some fans still say the videos help cultivate friendship, or even love. “Some fans say to us, ‘I follow the live streamer because they are the only one who knows my name.’”

(Claire Wolters. www.nationalgeographic.com. 31.07.2019. Adaptado.)

Read the text and answer question.

A __________ fact about Australia is that one Australian family in three (that’s approximately 33%) speak another language, apart from English. 

THE OBESITY-HUNGER PARADOX by SAM DOLNICK

When most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk. But a recent survey found that the most severe hungerrelated problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.

Call it the Bronx Paradox. “Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.” The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan.

But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average.

Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. “When you’re just trying to get your calorie intake, you’re going to get what fills your belly,” said Mr. Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” “And that may make you heavier even as you’re really struggling to secure enough food.”

Bloomberg administration officials see hunger and obesity as linked problems that can be addressed in part by making healthful food more affordable. “It’s a subtle, complicated link, but they’re very much linked, so the strategic response needs to be linked in various ways,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “We tackle the challenge on three fronts — providing income supports, increasing healthy options and encouraging nutritious behavior.”

To that end, the city offers a Health Bucks program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets by giving them an extra $2 coupon for every $5 spent there. The city has also created initiatives to send carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables to poor neighborhoods, and to draw grocery stores carrying fresh fruit and produce to low-income areas by offering them tax credits and other incentives.

But the Bronx’s hunger and obesity problems are not simply related to the lack of fresh food. Experts point to a swirling combination of factors that are tied to, and exacerbated by, poverty. Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.” Indeed, the food insecurity study is hardly the first statistical measure in which the Bronx lands on the top — or, in reality, the bottom. The borough’s 14.1 percent  unemployment rate is the highest in the state. It is one of the poorest counties in the nation. And it was recently ranked the unhealthiest of New York’s 62 counties. “If you look at rates of obesity, diabetes, poor access to grocery stores, poverty rates, unemployment and hunger measures, the Bronx lights up on all of those,” said Triada Stampas of the Food Bank for New York City. “They’re all very much interconnected.”

Http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html