Questões de Inglês

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The secret of why we like to eat chocolate

    Chocolate contains a number of interesting psychoactive chemicals. These include anandamide, whose name comes from the Sanskrit – “ananda”, meaning “joy, bliss, delight”. Anandamides, a neurotransmitter, stimulate the brain in much the same way that cannabis does. It also contains tyramine and phenylethylamine, both of which have similar effects to amphetamines. Finally, if you look hard enough, you will find small traces of theobromine and caffeine, both of which are well-known stimulants.

    For a while, some food scientists got very excited about the discovery but, although chocolate contains these substances, we now know they are only there in trace amounts. Your brain is not going to get much of a chemical rush from eating a few squares. None the less, they may play a small part in seducing our senses. So what else does chocolate have going for it? Well, it also has a creamy viscosity. When you take it out of its wrapper and put a bit in your mouth without biting, you will notice that it rapidly melts on your tongue, leaving a lingering sensation of smoothness. Special touch receptors on our tongues detect this textural change, which then stimulates feelings of pleasure.

    But the thing that really transformed the cocoa from a bitter and watery drink into the snack we adore today was the addition of sugar and fat. The addition of just the right amount of each is crucial to our enjoyment of chocolate. Look at the side of a packet of milk chocolate and you will see that it normally contains around 20-25% fat and 40-50% sugar. In nature such high levels of sugar and fat are rarely found, or at least not together. You can get lots of natural sugars from fruits and roots, and there is plenty of fat to be found in nuts or a tasty chunk of salmon, but one of the few places where you will find both together is in milk.

    Human breast milk is particularly rich in natural sugars, mainly lactose. Roughly 4% of human breast milk is fat, while about 8% is made up of sugars. Formula milk, which is fed to babies, contains a similar ratio of fats to sugars. This ratio, 1 g of fat to 2 g of sugars, is the same ratio of fats to sugars that you find in milk chocolate. And in biscuits, doughnuts, ice cream. In fact this particular ratio is reflected in many of the foods that we find hard to resist. So why do we love chocolate? For a whole host of reasons. But it may also be that we are trying to recapture the taste and sense of closeness we got from the first food we ever sampled: human breast milk.

(Michael Mosley. www.bbc.com, 24.02.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

The secret of why we like to eat chocolate

    Chocolate contains a number of interesting psychoactive chemicals. These include anandamide, whose name comes from the Sanskrit – “ananda”, meaning “joy, bliss, delight”. Anandamides, a neurotransmitter, stimulate the brain in much the same way that cannabis does. It also contains tyramine and phenylethylamine, both of which have similar effects to amphetamines. Finally, if you look hard enough, you will find small traces of theobromine and caffeine, both of which are well-known stimulants.

    For a while, some food scientists got very excited about the discovery but, although chocolate contains these substances, we now know they are only there in trace amounts. Your brain is not going to get much of a chemical rush from eating a few squares. None the less, they may play a small part in seducing our senses. So what else does chocolate have going for it? Well, it also has a creamy viscosity. When you take it out of its wrapper and put a bit in your mouth without biting, you will notice that it rapidly melts on your tongue, leaving a lingering sensation of smoothness. Special touch receptors on our tongues detect this textural change, which then stimulates feelings of pleasure.

    But the thing that really transformed the cocoa from a bitter and watery drink into the snack we adore today was the addition of sugar and fat. The addition of just the right amount of each is crucial to our enjoyment of chocolate. Look at the side of a packet of milk chocolate and you will see that it normally contains around 20-25% fat and 40-50% sugar. In nature such high levels of sugar and fat are rarely found, or at least not together. You can get lots of natural sugars from fruits and roots, and there is plenty of fat to be found in nuts or a tasty chunk of salmon, but one of the few places where you will find both together is in milk.

    Human breast milk is particularly rich in natural sugars, mainly lactose. Roughly 4% of human breast milk is fat, while about 8% is made up of sugars. Formula milk, which is fed to babies, contains a similar ratio of fats to sugars. This ratio, 1 g of fat to 2 g of sugars, is the same ratio of fats to sugars that you find in milk chocolate. And in biscuits, doughnuts, ice cream. In fact this particular ratio is reflected in many of the foods that we find hard to resist. So why do we love chocolate? For a whole host of reasons. But it may also be that we are trying to recapture the taste and sense of closeness we got from the first food we ever sampled: human breast milk.

(Michael Mosley. www.bbc.com, 24.02.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

The secret of why we like to eat chocolate

    Chocolate contains a number of interesting psychoactive chemicals. These include anandamide, whose name comes from the Sanskrit – “ananda”, meaning “joy, bliss, delight”. Anandamides, a neurotransmitter, stimulate the brain in much the same way that cannabis does. It also contains tyramine and phenylethylamine, both of which have similar effects to amphetamines. Finally, if you look hard enough, you will find small traces of theobromine and caffeine, both of which are well-known stimulants.

    For a while, some food scientists got very excited about the discovery but, although chocolate contains these substances, we now know they are only there in trace amounts. Your brain is not going to get much of a chemical rush from eating a few squares. None the less, they may play a small part in seducing our senses. So what else does chocolate have going for it? Well, it also has a creamy viscosity. When you take it out of its wrapper and put a bit in your mouth without biting, you will notice that it rapidly melts on your tongue, leaving a lingering sensation of smoothness. Special touch receptors on our tongues detect this textural change, which then stimulates feelings of pleasure.

    But the thing that really transformed the cocoa from a bitter and watery drink into the snack we adore today was the addition of sugar and fat. The addition of just the right amount of each is crucial to our enjoyment of chocolate. Look at the side of a packet of milk chocolate and you will see that it normally contains around 20-25% fat and 40-50% sugar. In nature such high levels of sugar and fat are rarely found, or at least not together. You can get lots of natural sugars from fruits and roots, and there is plenty of fat to be found in nuts or a tasty chunk of salmon, but one of the few places where you will find both together is in milk.

    Human breast milk is particularly rich in natural sugars, mainly lactose. Roughly 4% of human breast milk is fat, while about 8% is made up of sugars. Formula milk, which is fed to babies, contains a similar ratio of fats to sugars. This ratio, 1 g of fat to 2 g of sugars, is the same ratio of fats to sugars that you find in milk chocolate. And in biscuits, doughnuts, ice cream. In fact this particular ratio is reflected in many of the foods that we find hard to resist. So why do we love chocolate? For a whole host of reasons. But it may also be that we are trying to recapture the taste and sense of closeness we got from the first food we ever sampled: human breast milk.

(Michael Mosley. www.bbc.com, 24.02.2017. Adaptado.)

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Would you like my car to make you some water?

    A few years ago, Doug Martin, an engineer at Ford, read an article about an unusual billboard in Lima, Peru: It was designed to collect and filter water that condenses on the billboard’s cool surfaces when humid air rolls in from the coast. The billboard produces hundreds of gallons of clean water every week. “Local residents can just come and fill jugs with high-quality water and take it home,” Mr. Martin said.

    A short time later, a thought occurred to him: Why couldn’t a car produce drinking water, too? Air-conditioners in cars do something similar to the Peruvian billboard – generating water by removing moisture from the air. Then he and a Ford colleague, John Rollinger, went about developing a system that dispenses that moisture as cool and filtered drinking water to people inside the vehicle. Now Mr. Martin and Mr. Rollinger are working to turn their system into commercial technology.

    The drinking-water idea points to a wider change rippling through the global auto industry: As cars gain more computing power and adopt new technologies, engineers are finding ways to make cars do much more than take us from Point A to Point B.

    These days, some cars can serve as Wi-Fi hot spots, backup power generators or remote controls for your home. In the future, they might also monitor your health; seat suppliers are tinkering with sensors that can monitor a driver’s heart rate and body temperature.

(Neal E. Boudette. www.nytimes.com, 19.10.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Would you like my car to make you some water?

    A few years ago, Doug Martin, an engineer at Ford, read an article about an unusual billboard in Lima, Peru: It was designed to collect and filter water that condenses on the billboard’s cool surfaces when humid air rolls in from the coast. The billboard produces hundreds of gallons of clean water every week. “Local residents can just come and fill jugs with high-quality water and take it home,” Mr. Martin said.

    A short time later, a thought occurred to him: Why couldn’t a car produce drinking water, too? Air-conditioners in cars do something similar to the Peruvian billboard – generating water by removing moisture from the air. Then he and a Ford colleague, John Rollinger, went about developing a system that dispenses that moisture as cool and filtered drinking water to people inside the vehicle. Now Mr. Martin and Mr. Rollinger are working to turn their system into commercial technology.

    The drinking-water idea points to a wider change rippling through the global auto industry: As cars gain more computing power and adopt new technologies, engineers are finding ways to make cars do much more than take us from Point A to Point B.

    These days, some cars can serve as Wi-Fi hot spots, backup power generators or remote controls for your home. In the future, they might also monitor your health; seat suppliers are tinkering with sensors that can monitor a driver’s heart rate and body temperature.

(Neal E. Boudette. www.nytimes.com, 19.10.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Would you like my car to make you some water?

    A few years ago, Doug Martin, an engineer at Ford, read an article about an unusual billboard in Lima, Peru: It was designed to collect and filter water that condenses on the billboard’s cool surfaces when humid air rolls in from the coast. The billboard produces hundreds of gallons of clean water every week. “Local residents can just come and fill jugs with high-quality water and take it home,” Mr. Martin said.

    A short time later, a thought occurred to him: Why couldn’t a car produce drinking water, too? Air-conditioners in cars do something similar to the Peruvian billboard – generating water by removing moisture from the air. Then he and a Ford colleague, John Rollinger, went about developing a system that dispenses that moisture as cool and filtered drinking water to people inside the vehicle. Now Mr. Martin and Mr. Rollinger are working to turn their system into commercial technology.

    The drinking-water idea points to a wider change rippling through the global auto industry: As cars gain more computing power and adopt new technologies, engineers are finding ways to make cars do much more than take us from Point A to Point B.

    These days, some cars can serve as Wi-Fi hot spots, backup power generators or remote controls for your home. In the future, they might also monitor your health; seat suppliers are tinkering with sensors that can monitor a driver’s heart rate and body temperature.

(Neal E. Boudette. www.nytimes.com, 19.10.2017. Adaptado.)