Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

This text refers to question.

How to Stop Eating Sugar

By David Leonhardt

If you’re like most Americans, you eat more sugar than is good for you. But it’s entirely possible to eat less sugar without sacrificing much — if any — of the pleasures of eating. Surprising as it may sound, many people who have cut back on sugar say they find their new eating habits more pleasurable than their old ones. This guide will walk you through why sugar matters, how you can make smart food choices to reduce sugar consumption, and how you can keep your life sweet, even without so many sweets.

Here's why you eat more sugar than you realize, and why it's a problem. The first thing to know: Added sugars, of one kind or another, are almost everywhere in the modern diet. They’re in sandwich bread, chicken stock, pickles, salad dressing, crackers, yogurt and cereal, as well as in the obvious foods and drinks, like soda and desserts.

The biggest problem with added sweeteners is that they make it easy to overeat. They’re tasty and highly caloric but they often don’t make you feel full. Instead, they can trick you into wanting even more food. Because we’re surrounded by added sweeteners — in our kitchens, in restaurants, at schools and offices — most of us will eat too much of them unless we consciously set out to do otherwise.

It’s not an accident. The sugar industry has conducted an aggressive, decades-long campaign to blame the obesity epidemic on fats, not sugars. Fats, after all, seem as if they should cause obesity. Thanks partly to that campaign, sugar consumption soared in the United States even as people were trying to lose weight. But research increasingly indicates that an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem in modern diets. Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Fortunately, more people are realizing the harms of sugar and cutting back.

[...]

Changing your diet is hard. If your strategy involves thinking about sugar all the time — whenever you’re shopping or eating — you’ll likely fail. You’ll also be miserable in the process. It’s much more effective to come up with a few simple rules and habits that then become second nature. (One strategy to consider: Eliminate all added sugars for one month, and then add back only the ones you miss. It’s easier than it sounds.)

Above all, most people’s goal should be to find a few simple, lasting ways to cut back on sugar. Once you’re done reading this guide, we suggest you choose two or three of our ideas and try them for a few weeks.

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/smarterliving/how-to-stop-eating-sugar (text adapted).

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    From French electronic and Japanese indie to K-pop and Spanish jazz, it’s common for people to listen to songs they don’t necessarily understand. Not knowing the language of the lyrics, it seems, doesn’t stop people from liking—and sometimes even singing along to—a song. Unless the listener is looking up the dictionary meaning of the lyrics, then the dictionary meaning of the lyrics doesn’t make or break their appreciation of a song. But why?

    “It’s a complicated answer,” said musicologist Lisa Decenteceo, adding that it all starts with what’s called “sound symbolism.” Sound symbolism refers to the study of the relationships between utterances and their meaning. This doesn’t have to do only with music. Marketers, for example, can tune into sound symbolism as part of their strategy in coming up with appealing brand names. In music as well as in branding, Decenteceo explained, there’s something about the appeal of words as sounds, beyond their meaning in a language. While things like culture and personal experiences affect people’s responses to different kinds of music, she explained there are certain musical techniques that are generally used to convey certain moods. One of which is scale. “Songs in a major scale usually have brighter, happier sounds, while minor scales usually have the slightly darker, melancholic feel,” explains Thea Tolentino, a music teacher.

    The human brain is wired to respond to sound, she added. In a process called entrainment, the brain “synchronizes our breathing, our movement, even neural activities with the sounds we hear.” This is why fast-paced music is so popular for running, for example, or why some yoga teachers play rhythmic and melodic tracks in their classes. And there are also the things that accompany the words. “Elements of sound and music like pitch, melody, harmony, timbre, and amplitude have an affective, emotional, psychological, cognitive, and even physical impact on listeners. Music adds so much meaning and dimension to texts through a complex of these avenues,” said Decenteceo. What all these things do, she added, is liberate the words. “Song frees the voice from any burden of saying anything meaningful”. It’s important, then, to understand music as a discourse between musical elements. But all in all, Decenteceo said there’s value in whatever immediate appeal people find in the music they listen to, whether or not they understand the words. Music, after all, is the universal language.

Disponível em https://www.vice.com/. March, 2022. Adaptado.

T E X T

Nearly Half of Covid Patients Haven’t Fully Recovered Months Later, Study Finds

    A study of tens of thousands of people in
Scotland found that one in 20 people who had been sick
with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another
four in 10 said they had not fully recovered from their
[5] infections many months later.
    The authors of the study, published in the journal
Nature Communications, tried to home in on the longterm risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of
symptoms in people with and without previous Covid
[10] diagnoses.
    People with previous symptomatic Covid
infections reported certain persistent symptoms, such
as breathlessness, palpitations and confusion or
difficulty concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as
[15] high as uninfected people in surveys from six to 18
months later, the study found. Those patients also
experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other
symptoms relating to the heart, respiratory health,
muscle aches, mental health and the sensory system.
[20]     The findings strengthened calls from scientists
for more expansive care options for long Covid patients
in the United States and elsewhere, while also offering
some good news.
    The study did not identify greater risks of long

[25] term problems in people with asymptomatic
coronavirus infections. It also found, in a much more
limited subset of participants who had been given at
least one dose of Covid vaccine before their infections,
that vaccination appeared to help reduce if not
[30] eliminate the risk of some long Covid symptoms.
    People with severe initial Covid cases were at
higher risk of long-term problems, the study found. “The
beauty of this study is they have a control group, and
they can isolate the proportion of symptomatology that
[35] is attributable to Covid infection,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly,
chief of research at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System
and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in
St. Louis, who was not involved in the research. “It also
tracks with the broader idea that long Covid is truly a
[40] multisystem disorder,” Dr. Al-Aly said, one that resides
“not only in the brain, not only in the heart — it’s all of
the above.”
    Jill Pell, a professor of public health at the
University of Glasgow who led the research, said the

[45] findings reinforced the importance of long Covid
patients being offered support that extends beyond
health care and also addresses needs related to jobs,
education, poverty and disability. “It told us that Covid
can appear differently in different individuals, and it can
[50] have more than one impact on your life,” Dr. Pell said.
“Any approach to supporting people has to be, firstly,
personalized and also holistic. The answer doesn’t just
lie within the health care sector.
    Long Covid refers to a constellation of problems
[55] that can plague patients for months or longer after an
infection. Over the last year, researchers have given
more attention to understanding the daunting
aftereffects as the number of Covid cases exploded and
health systems learned to better manage the initial
[60] stages of an infection. U.S. government estimates have
indicated that between 7.7 million and 23 million people
in the United States could have long Covid.
    Globally, “the condition is devastating people’s
lives and livelihoods,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
[65] the director general of the World Health Organization,
wrote in an article for The Guardian. He called on all
countries to devote “immediate and sustained action
equivalent to its scale.”
    The authors of the study in Scotland tracked
[70] 33,000 people who had tested positive for the virus
starting in April 2020 and 63,000 who had never been
diagnosed with Covid. In six-month intervals, those
people were asked about any symptoms they had,
including tiredness, muscle aches, chest pain and
neurological problems, and about any difficulties with
[75] daily life.
    Of those with previous Covid cases, 6 percent
said on their most recent follow-up survey that they had
not recovered at all and 42 percent said that they had
[80] only partly recovered. Women, older people and those
living in poorer areas faced more serious aftereffects
from a Covid infection. So, too, did those with preexisting health problems, including respiratory disease
and depression.
[85]     Only a small portion of the study participants —
about 4 percent — had been vaccinated before their
infections, and many of those with only a single dose.
“We’re now really heavily reliant upon vaccination,” Dr.
Pell said, “which does confer some protection, but it’s
[90] not absolute.”

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/

Read the text to answer question 

    In the late 1960s, following the Apollo 11 Moon landings, the three astronauts were waiting to be picked up inside their capsule floating in the Pacific Ocean — and they were hot and uncomfortable. NASA officials decided to make things more pleasant for their three national heroes. The downside? There was a small possibility of unleashing deadly alien microbes on Earth.

   When humanity first made plans to send probes and people into space in the mid-20th Century, the issue of contamination came up. Firstly, there was the fear of “forward” contamination — the possibility that Earth-based life might accidentally hitch a ride into the cosmos. Spacecraft needed to be sterilised and carefully packaged before launch. If microbes silently moved onboard, it would confuse any attempts to detect alien life. And if there were extra-terrestrial organisms out there, we might end up inadvertently killing them with Earth-based bacteria or viruses. These concerns matter just as much today as they did back in the Space Race era.

    A second concern was “back” contamination. This was the idea that astronauts, rockets or probes returning to Earth might bring back life that could prove catastrophic, either by consuming all our oxygen or outcompeting Earth organisms. What if the astronauts brought back something dangerous? At the time, the probability was not considered high, but still, the scenario had to be explored. “Maybe it’s sure to 99% that Apollo 11 will not bring back lunar organisms,” said one influential scientist at the time, “but even that 1% of uncertainty is too large to be complacent about.”

    NASA put several quarantine measures in place — in some cases, a little reluctantly. Concerned officials from the US Public Health Service argued for stricter measures than initially planned, pointing out that they had the power to refuse border entry to contaminated astronauts. NASA then agreed to install a costly quarantine facility on the ship that would pick up the men from their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. It was also agreed that the lunar explorers would then spend three weeks in isolation before they could hug their families or shake the hand of the president.  

(Richard Fisher. www.bbc.com, 18.02.2021. Adapted.)

Examine o gráfico e o mapa e leia o texto para responder à questão.

In March 2022, parts of Antarctica have been 40 ºC warmer than their March average

    The Concordia research station is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. At 3,000m above sea level on the Antarctic Plateau, the temperature rarely rises above -25 ºC even in the summer. In midwinter it can fall to around -80 ºC. The air is painfully dry, and fingers, toes and noses can freeze in minutes. The dozen or so crew, mainly French and Italian, who live and work in the station would normally venture out only for essential work. But Concordia has recently experienced a heatwave. On March 18th the temperature reached a high of -11.8 ºC — more than 40 ºC warmer than the average for this time of year.

    Similarly freakish weather was recorded across eastern Antarctica. Temperatures at the Russian-run Vostok research station rose to -17.7 ºC, more than 15 ºC above the previous record for March, set in 1967. Across the continent temperatures were 4.5 ºC higher than usual (though in recent days they have returned to a normal range).

    Meteorologists have attributed the latest heatwave to an atmospheric “river” of warm, damp air blowing towards Antarctica from the Southern Ocean near Australia. It is difficult to know whether climate change is to blame for one-off weather events. But over the past 65 years or so there has been an increase in the number of “high temperature” days at Antarctic stations.

    Most regions of Antarctica have been spared global warming. In the late 20th century, a large hole opened up in the ozone layer above the South Pole. This has a regional cooling effect, which has offset much of the heating caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Temperatures on the continent rarely climb above freezing, which preserves its vast ice sheets (although rising sea temperatures do threaten some areas). Even in the recent surge, temperatures stayed well below zero.

(www.economist.com, 24.03.2022. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

World’s happiest ranking goes to Finland for fifth year in a row

    Finland was crowned the happiest country in the world for the fifth consecutive year, with a score significantly ahead of its peers in the World Happiness Report 2022 ranking, published by a body linked to the United Nations. However, the authors detected, on average, a long-term moderate upward trend in stress, worry, and sadness in most countries, as well as “a slight long-term decline in the enjoyment of life,” they wrote.

    The report uses global survey data to report on how people evaluate their own lives in more than 150 countries around the world, with the ranking based on a three-year average. Key variables that contribute to explaining people’s life evaluations include healthy life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom to make life choices, perceptions of corruption, and the gross domestic product per capita (an indicator that measures a country’s economic output per person, that is calculated by dividing the total gross domestic product of a country by its population).

    “World leaders should take heed,” Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said. “Politics should be directed as the great sages long ago insisted: to the well-being of the people, not the power of the rulers.”

(Kati Pohjanpalo. www.bloomberg.com, 18.03.2022. Adaptado.)