Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

O texto a seguir é referência para a questão.

The Real Harm in Multitasking

By Dr. Travis Bradberry

    You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain. Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time.
    A Special Skill?
    But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers – those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance – were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time.
    Multitasking Lowers IQ
    Research also shows that, in addition to slowing you down, multitasking lowers your IQ. A study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they’d expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.

(From: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141008153512-50578967-multitasking-damages-your-brain-and-your-career-new-studies-suggest.)

  In short, Virginia Woolf suggests that time exists in different forms. It exists in the external world, but also — and perhaps more importantly — in our internal world. Her description of the loud and rushing civilization suggests that we push ahead in the name of progress, without fully appreciating the moment. Through the character of Clarissa, Woolf challenges the usual definition of success. Perhaps we need not leave some magnificent gift behind in the form of a building or a concrete art piece. Instead, maybe it is how we live our lives and our appreciation for the present that are truly more powerful and eternal. The small gifts we offer others, like bringing people together through a party, can touch people differently than a monument.

  Woolf’s message about time should be heeded. Our rush to leave a dramatic mark in the world leads to further destruction. Tension abounds in our modern world as we create technology to increase our efficiency. Our civilization tends to see scientific and monumental achievements as the most valid measures of an individual’s success. However, in the process, our communities disintegrate. More and more people complain of feeling alienated. The evidence surrounds us. The internal time that allows us to slow down and be involved with people finds itself dominated by external societal time. Some might find Clarissa Dalloway’s gift to the world to be trivial. However, we need individuals with the ability to pull people together — people with the ability to create community where it no longer exists.

Internet: <prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu> (adapted).

The text conveys the idea that

A questão se refere ao texto a seguir:

  […] A picture of Brighton beach in 1976, featured in the Guardian a few weeks ago, appeared to show an alien
race. Almost everyone was slim. I mentioned it on social media, then went on holiday. When I returned, I found that
people were still debating it. The heated discussion prompted me to read more. How have we grown so fat, so fast? To
my astonishment, almost every explanation proposed in the thread turned out to be untrue. […] The obvious
[5] explanation, many on social media insisted, is that we’re eating more. […]
  So here’s the first big surprise: we ate more in 1976. According to government figures, we currently consume an
average of 2,130 kilocalories a day, a figure that appears to include sweets and alcohol. But in 1976, we consumed
2,280 kcal excluding alcohol and sweets, or 2,590 kcal when they’re included. I have found no reason to disbelieve the
figu res. […]
[10]   So what has happened? The light begins to dawn when you look at the nutrition figures in more detail. Yes, we
ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy half as much fresh milk per person, but five times more yoghurt, three
times more ice cream and – wait for it – 39 times as many dairy desserts. We buy half as many eggs as in 1976, but a
third more breakfast cereals and twice the cereal snacks; half the total potatoes, but three times the crisps. While our
direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have
[15] rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we
consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other
words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to
be the issue.
  The shift has not happened by accident. As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food
[20] companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control
mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defenses, including
through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating
more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.
  They hire biddable scientists and thinktanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the
[30]  tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After
spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
  To judge by the debate the 1976 photograph triggered, it works. “There are no excuses. Take responsibility for
your own lives, people!” “No one force feeds you junk food, it’s personal choice. We’re not lemmings.” “Sometimes I think
having free healthcare is a mistake. It’s everyone’s right to be lazy and fat because there is a sense of entitlement about
[35] getting fixed.” The thrill of disapproval chimes disastrously with industry propaganda. We delight in blaming the victims.
  More alarmingly, according to a paper in the Lancet, more than 90% of policymakers believe that “personal
motivation” is “a strong or very strong influence on the rise of obesity”. Such people propose no mechanism by which the
61% of English people who are overweight or obese have lost their willpower. But this improbable explanation seems
immune to evidence.
[40]  Perhaps this is because obesophobia is often a fatly-disguised form of snobbery. In most rich nations, obesity
rates are much higher at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. They correlate strongly with inequality, which helps to
explain why the UK’s incidence is greater than in most European and OECD nations. The scientific literature shows how
the lower spending power, stress, anxiety and depression associated with low social status makes people more
vulnerable to bad diets.
[45]  Just as jobless people are blamed for structural unemployment, and indebted people are blamed for impossible
housing costs, fat people are blamed for a societal problem. But yes, willpower needs to be exercised – by governments.
Yes, we need personal responsibility – on the part of policymakers. And yes, control needs to be exerted – over those
who have discovered our weaknesses and ruthlessly exploit them. 

Adaptado de:

ANYTHING CAN BE RESCINDED

By Isabel Hull

[1]     The Paris Peace Pact of 1928 is a treaty few remember and which is ridiculed by many of those who do. Otherwise known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact –
after its authors, the US secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand – its signatories agreed specifically to ‘condemn
recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another’.
Lacking any means of enforcement, and seemingly swept aside by the Second World War only 11 years later, Kellogg-Briand has been seen as hopelessly
utopian, as evanescent and dated as the Charleston (a popular dance of that period). But Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, in their book The
Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War, argue that it was revolutionary. By outlawing war, it laid the legal foundations for a ‘New World Order’
which still prevails, but which we fail to appreciate.
[2]     The book begins with a bleak description of the ‘Old World Order’, which rested on the right of states, in the absence of a world court, to resort to war
to redress grievances or solve disputes. War was a legal mechanism. Hathaway and Shapiro’s study of more than four hundred declarations of war from
the late 16th century to 1939 reveals that self-defence and the enforcement of treaty, international or succession laws were the reasons cited most often
by states. In addition to permitting frequent armed conflict, the lawful status of war had other consequences for international relations. Since force could
be used to resolve conflicts, the system rewarded the powerful, sanctifying the principle of ‘might is right’. It also legitimated conquest, both as
compensation for injury and as the outcome of a contest of force in which the weaker side lost. It permitted the threat of force (gunboat diplomacy). It
protected the decision makers who waged war and the soldiers who fought it, because both were engaged in a legal activity. Killing in war wasn’t murder.
And, finally, lawful war required absolute impartiality from neutrals (for example, in their trade or commerce with belligerents), since they were not parties
to the dispute. Economic sanctions were therefore illegal. This state of affairs lasted into the 20th century, and Hathaway and Shapiro see the First World
War as its ‘terrible culmination’. Even the League of Nations ‘did not herald’ [anunciar] its end because its covenant still permitted member states to resort
to war over serious, non-judiciable disputes after a three-month cooling-off period.
[3]     Hathaway and Shapiro’s premise is that since states seemed incapable of weaning themselves off [se desacostumar de] warfare, civil society had to
intervene.
[4]     Among the ‘internationalists’ who helped broker, institutionalize and interpret the Kellogg-Briand Pact, one of the most significant was Hersch
Lauterpacht, the Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge University. In the late 1930s, he rigorously and successfully argued that the Kellogg-

Briand Pact had overturned the basic structures of the international order. Neutrals were no longer bound [amarrados, obrigados] to impartiality,
permitting policies that helped victims of aggression. And because it resulted from a criminal act, conquest was now illegal. Individual leaders could be
held responsible for waging [fazer, proseguir] illegal wars (the principle behind the Nuremberg Trials). And treaties extorted by coercion were invalid.
Lauterpacht’s briefs [pareceres] to the US and British governments in the 1940s helped establish these principles, making him ‘the father of the New World
Order’, which since 1945 has been characterized by remarkably few inter-state wars or annexations.
[5]     Hathaway and Shapiro’s point, then, is that ‘for all its problems, the New World Order is better than the Old.’

Adapted from the London Review of Books, 26 April 2018.