Questões de Inglês - Vocabulary

Leia o texto a seguir para responder a questão.

“I’ve switched off the lights and I´m using candles now”

Although not exactly scared witless, the people questioned have grasped one fundamental implication of the credit crunch: to prioritize meeting real needs over confected wants. This shows up in what they’ve cut back on. “I’m just getting the essential now” and “I’m cutting back on luxury things like expensive food and taking taxis when I could go on the bus or the tube.” We need, let’s say, emotional intimacy or antibiotics for our children when they are sick, whereas we only want a widescreen television. As money becomes tight, every time we are about to purchase something we should automatically start asking ourselves, “Do I need this, or do I just want it?” …Pursuing wants rather than needs is very bad for mental health. It creates an inner emptiness, a constant hunger for more.

Oliver James in Speak Up 260.

Leia o texto a seguir para responder a questão.

“I’ve switched off the lights and I´m using candles now”

Although not exactly scared witless, the people questioned have grasped one fundamental implication of the credit crunch: to prioritize meeting real needs over confected wants. This shows up in what they’ve cut back on. “I’m just getting the essential now” and “I’m cutting back on luxury things like expensive food and taking taxis when I could go on the bus or the tube.” We need, let’s say, emotional intimacy or antibiotics for our children when they are sick, whereas we only want a widescreen television. As money becomes tight, every time we are about to purchase something we should automatically start asking ourselves, “Do I need this, or do I just want it?” …Pursuing wants rather than needs is very bad for mental health. It creates an inner emptiness, a constant hunger for more.

Oliver James in Speak Up 260.

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Ecological Intelligence

Bryan Walsh

    When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn´t tell the whole story – like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you possibly consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it?

    Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose – and probably couldn´t make sense of the information even if we had it.

   But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That´s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision – and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That´s thinking ecologically – understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices.

(Time, March.12, 2009)