Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

INSTRUCTION: Read the text to answer question.

Your brain’s roughly 86 billion interconnected neurons endow it with the ability to understand the world, plan actions, and solve problems. Doing so requires the brain to incorporate all available information. By combining information from all of your body’s senses, the brain paints a picture of the world around you. Then, using inference and instinct, the brain makes sense of the picture it assembles.

The brain both makes and uses emotions, which are value judgments that help the brain respond effectively to events. It associates the pictures it assembles with feelings to form memories. Our brains store those memories, learn from them, and use that knowledge in the future. By combining all of these tools with imagination, your brain can predict future events, calculate your next move, and devise plans for future opportunities. Consciousness requires that all of these activities function normally. In other words, your brain’s trillions of connections work together to understand the world, to think about the future, and to create … you.

Available at: https://www.brainfacts.org/the-brain-facts-book. Accessed on: Aug 20, 2021.

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    There is no agent of ecological imperialism more ferocious than the wild pig. Wherever Europeans invaded, from the Americas to Australia, so did their pigs, many of which escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc. The beasts tear through native plants and animals, they spread disease, they destroy crops, and they reconstruct whole ecosystems in their wake. They’re not so much pests as they are chaos embodied.

    Now add climate change to the wild pig’s résumé of destruction. In their never-ending search for food, the pigs root through soils, churning the dirt like a farmer tills fields. Scientists already knew, to some extent, that this releases the carbon that’s locked in the soil, but researchers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US have now calculated how much soil wild pigs may be disturbing worldwide. The carbon dioxide emissions that they produce annually, the authors concluded, equal that of more than a million cars.

    It’s yet another piece of an increasingly worrisome puzzle, showing how modification of the land has — in this case, inadvertently — exacerbated climate change. “Anytime you disturb soil, you’re causing emissions,” says University of Queensland ecologist Christopher O’Bryan, lead author on a new paper describing the research in the journal Global Change Biology. “When you till soil for agriculture, for example, or you have widespread land-use change — urbanization, forest loss.”

    Given their domination of whole landscapes, pigs had to be making things worse, the researchers knew, but no one had modeled it worldwide. “We started to realize there’s a big gap at the global scale looking at this question,” O’Bryan adds.

(Matt Simon. www.wired.com, 19.07.2021. Adaptado.)

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO.

    If you take a look at my smartphone, you’ll know that I like to order out. But am I helping the small local businesses? You would think that if you own a restaurant you’d be thrilled to have an outsourced service that would take care of your delivery operations while leveraging their marketing might to expand your businesses’ brand. However, restaurant owners have complained of lack of quality control once their food goes out the door. They don’t like that the delivery people are the face of their product when it gets into the customer’s hand. Some of the delivery services have been accused of listing restaurants on their apps without the owners’ permission, and oftentimes publish menu items and prices that are incorrect or out of date.

    But there is another reason why restaurant owners aren’t fond of delivery services. It’s the costs, which, for some, are becoming unsustainable. Even with the increased revenues from the delivery services, the fees wind up killing a restaurant’s margins to the extent that it’s at best marginally profitable. Therefore, some restaurants are pushing harder to drive orders from their own websites and offering special deals for customers that use their in-house delivery people.

    The simple fact is that these delivery apps are here to stay. They are enormously popular and have significantly grown. I believe that restaurant owners that resist these apps are hurting their brands by missing out on potential customers. The good news is that the delivery platforms are not as evil as some would portray them. They have some skin in the game. They are competing against other services. They want their listed restaurants to profit. Maybe instead of fighting, the nation’s restaurant industry needs to proactively embrace the delivery service industry and figure out ways to profitably work together.

The Guardian. 02 December, 2020. Adaptado.

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Why smelling good could come with a cost to health

About 4,000 chemicals are currently used to scent products, but you won’t find any of them listed on a label. Fragrance formulations are considered a “trade secret” and therefore protected from disclosure – even to regulators or manufacturers. Instead, one word, fragrance, appears on ingredients lists for countless cosmetics, personal care and cleaning products. A single scent may contain anywhere from 50 to 300 distinct chemicals.

Three-quarters of the toxic chemicals detected in a test of 140 products came from fragrance, reported a 2018 BCPP study of personal care and cleaning brands. The chemicals identified were linked to chronic health issues, including cancer.

Besides common reactions to fragrance – about 35% of people report migraines or respiratory problems because of fragrance. More than 1,200 fragrance chemicals currently in use have been flagged as potential or known “chemicals of concern”. These include seven carcinogens, 15 chemicals prohibited from use in cosmetics in the EU and others cited in various international warning lists. Endocrine disrupters, which mimic human hormones, are of particular concern to many researchers and advocates, as they can have effects in the tiniest doses.

Trying to avoid fragrance chemicals is perhaps one of the trickiest modern consumer challenges. Even products labeled as unscented could have some fragrance to mask the smell of other chemicals. Watchdogs also caution that even products claiming to be “natural” or “organic” could still be harboring harmful fragrances.

Adaptado de: https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2019/may/23/fragrance-perfume-personal-cleaning-productshealth-issues Acessado em 05 de junho de 2021.