Questões de Inglês

A New Test And Treatment For Alzheimer’s Disease

 

Alzheimer’s 1 disease is a deadly neurodegenerative

disorder and there’s no cure for it. However, scientists appear

to have found a compound that could be used to develop a drug

4 for treating patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,

Huntington’s and other disorders.

As you might know, when a brain cell is hijacked by

7 a virus, the result is the building up of viral proteins. The cells

defend by stopping almost all protein production to make sure

that the virus doesn’t spread.

10 The same defense mechanism is started by many

neurodegenerative disorders which involve the production of

“faulty” proteins. But the cells shut down the production of

13 proteins for so long that they die due to hunger. This

mechanism can lead to the death of neurons throughout the

brain, resulting in movement or memory problems or can even

16 be fatal depending on the disorder.

The compound that was used by the scientists

prevented the defense mechanisms from being activated, so

19 there was no neurodegeneration. When the compound was used

on mice, it prevented all neuron death from prion disease.

Of course, more research is required on the compound

22 before a drug can be developed for use on humans, but this

certainly seems to be a good start.

According to Prof. Roger Morris, from King’s College London,

25 “This finding, I suspect, will be judged by history as

a turning point in the search for medicines to control and

prevent Alzheimer’s disease”.

Internet: <www.mobilemag.com> (adapted).

According to the text, it is correct to state that

A New Test And Treatment For Alzheimer’s Disease

 

Alzheimer’s 1 disease is a deadly neurodegenerative

disorder and there’s no cure for it. However, scientists appear

to have found a compound that could be used to develop a drug

4 for treating patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,

Huntington’s and other disorders.

As you might know, when a brain cell is hijacked by

7 a virus, the result is the building up of viral proteins. The cells

defend by stopping almost all protein production to make sure

that the virus doesn’t spread.

10 The same defense mechanism is started by many

neurodegenerative disorders which involve the production of

“faulty” proteins. But the cells shut down the production of

13 proteins for so long that they die due to hunger. This

mechanism can lead to the death of neurons throughout the

brain, resulting in movement or memory problems or can even

16 be fatal depending on the disorder.

The compound that was used by the scientists

prevented the defense mechanisms from being activated, so

19 there was no neurodegeneration. When the compound was used

on mice, it prevented all neuron death from prion disease.

Of course, more research is required on the compound

22 before a drug can be developed for use on humans, but this

certainly seems to be a good start.

According to Prof. Roger Morris, from King’s College London,

25 “This finding, I suspect, will be judged by history as

a turning point in the search for medicines to control and

prevent Alzheimer’s disease”.

Internet: <www.mobilemag.com> (adapted).

The main purpose of the article is

Turning Calvin’s sentence from the 2nd strip: “If I don’t have it, she’ll kill me!” into the 2nd Conditional, as if in a hypothetical situation, we would have:

Footing the Bill on Friendship

Paying someone to be your pal may be the ultimate contradiction in terms

 

  Need someone to go to the movies with? Desperate to try that hip new restaurant but don’t want to go alone? Need someone to gossip with during your next binge-watching weekend on Netflix? 

  Good news: There is someone who would love to do all those things with you... for a price.  

  In the past few years, online “friend rental” services have been growing in popularity, offering users a chance to  pay for (nonsexual) companionship. The “friends” determine their rates, either by specific activities or for predetermined lengths of time, and users have the opportunity to choose the person (or price range) best suited to their needs. 

  RentAFriend, the most popular such site, claims to have much more than 500,000 friends available worldwide for everything from museum visits to skydiving. But in order to get in touch with them (and start the hondeling), users need to cough up a $24.95/month membership fee 

  Helen White, a Boston-based friend, says she has been paid $20 an hour just for her company. “We went to a concert together,” she says of one date. “All in all, I made $60, plus he bought my drinks. It was actually very natural; there wasn’t any awkwardness, like you might expect. We had a great conversation.” 

  David Bakke, an Atlanta-based friend, has had similar experiences. “The first time I had dinner with a woman who was in town for business, and the second, I went to a basketball game with a guy who I think had a friend cancel on him at the last minute.” Both times Bakke, a freelance writer, waived his fee since the clients paid for the night’s entertainment. 

  Yet some mental-health professionals question the underlying premise: the idea that friendship is something that should, or even can, be bought. Dr. Carole  Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, says that the very existence of RentAFriend is “an incredibly sad commentary on the state of human relationships.” 

  “Real friendship comes from shared experiences and values, and in true friendships, friends are equal,” says Lieberman. “Renting friendship is by its very nature untrustworthy, unequal and temporary. Once you stop paying, that person will no longer be there for you; that’s the antithesis of friendship, if you ask me.”  

www.newsweek.com / March 4, 2014

The underlined words binge, cough up, cancel and untrustworthy in the text are equivalent to:

Footing the Bill on Friendship

Paying someone to be your pal may be the ultimate contradiction in terms

 

  Need someone to go to the movies with? Desperate to try that hip new restaurant but don’t want to go alone? Need someone to gossip with during your next binge-watching weekend on Netflix? 

  Good news: There is someone who would love to do all those things with you... for a price.  

  In the past few years, online “friend rental” services have been growing in popularity, offering users a chance to  pay for (nonsexual) companionship. The “friends” determine their rates, either by specific activities or for predetermined lengths of time, and users have the opportunity to choose the person (or price range) best suited to their needs. 

  RentAFriend, the most popular such site, claims to have much more than 500,000 friends available worldwide for everything from museum visits to skydiving. But in order to get in touch with them (and start the hondeling), users need to cough up a $24.95/month membership fee 

  Helen White, a Boston-based friend, says she has been paid $20 an hour just for her company. “We went to a concert together,” she says of one date. “All in all, I made $60, plus he bought my drinks. It was actually very natural; there wasn’t any awkwardness, like you might expect. We had a great conversation.” 

  David Bakke, an Atlanta-based friend, has had similar experiences. “The first time I had dinner with a woman who was in town for business, and the second, I went to a basketball game with a guy who I think had a friend cancel on him at the last minute.” Both times Bakke, a freelance writer, waived his fee since the clients paid for the night’s entertainment. 

  Yet some mental-health professionals question the underlying premise: the idea that friendship is something that should, or even can, be bought. Dr. Carole  Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, says that the very existence of RentAFriend is “an incredibly sad commentary on the state of human relationships.” 

  “Real friendship comes from shared experiences and values, and in true friendships, friends are equal,” says Lieberman. “Renting friendship is by its very nature untrustworthy, unequal and temporary. Once you stop paying, that person will no longer be there for you; that’s the antithesis of friendship, if you ask me.” 

www.newsweek.com / March 4, 2014

The main idea of the text is

Global warming

Who pressed the pause button?

 

The slowdown in rising temperatures over the past 15 years goes from being unexplained to overexplained 

 

 

  BETWEEN 1998 and 2013, the Earth’s surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s. Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide (which would be expected to push temperatures up) rose uninterruptedly. This pause in warming has raised doubts in the public mind about climate change. A few sceptics say flatly that global warming has stopped. Others argue that scientists’ understanding of the climate is so flawed that their judgments about it cannot be accepted with any confidence. A convincing explanation of the  pause therefore matters both to a properunderstanding of the climate and to the credibility of climate science—and papers published over the past few weeks do their best to provide one. Indeed, they do almost too good a job. If all were correct, the pause would now be explained twice over 

  This is the opposite of what happened at first. As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some scientists dismissed it as a blip. The temperature, they pointed out, had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so, in 1880-1910 and again in 1945-75 (see chart), even though the general trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year hiatus, they suggested, was not worth getting excited about. 

  An alternative way of looking at the pause’s significance was to say that there had been a slowdown but not a big one. Most records, including one of the best known (kept by Britain’s Meteorological Office), do not include measurements from the Arctic, which has been warming faster than anywhere else in the world. Using satellite data to fill in the missing Arctic numbers, Kevin Cowtan of the University of York, in Britain, and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa, in Canada, put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12°C a decade between 1998 and 2012—not far from the 1990s rate. A study by NASA puts the “Arctic effect” over the same period somewhat lower, at 0.07°C a decade, but that is still not negligible. 

 

 

  It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only measure of climate change. According to a study just published by Sonia Seneviratne of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, in Zurich, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the length of warm periods all increased during the pause (1998-2012). A more stable average temperature hides wider extremes. Still, attempts to explain away that stable average have not been convincing, partly because of the conflict between flat temperatures and rising CO₂ emissions, and partly because observed temperatures are now falling outside the range climate models predict. The models embody the state of climate knowledge. If they are wrong, the knowledge is probably faulty, too. Hence attempts to explain the pause. 

Mar 8th 2014 | www.economist.com

The word "hence" in the underlined sentence from the last paragraph of the text: “Hence attempts to explain the pause.” conveys an idea of