Questões de Inglês

THE OBESITY-HUNGER PARADOX by SAM DOLNICK

When most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk. But a recent survey found that the most severe hungerrelated problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.

Call it the Bronx Paradox. “Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.” The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan.

But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average.

Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. “When you’re just trying to get your calorie intake, you’re going to get what fills your belly,” said Mr. Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” “And that may make you heavier even as you’re really struggling to secure enough food.”

Bloomberg administration officials see hunger and obesity as linked problems that can be addressed in part by making healthful food more affordable. “It’s a subtle, complicated link, but they’re very much linked, so the strategic response needs to be linked in various ways,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “We tackle the challenge on three fronts — providing income supports, increasing healthy options and encouraging nutritious behavior.”

To that end, the city offers a Health Bucks program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets by giving them an extra $2 coupon for every $5 spent there. The city has also created initiatives to send carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables to poor neighborhoods, and to draw grocery stores carrying fresh fruit and produce to low-income areas by offering them tax credits and other incentives.

But the Bronx’s hunger and obesity problems are not simply related to the lack of fresh food. Experts point to a swirling combination of factors that are tied to, and exacerbated by, poverty. Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.” Indeed, the food insecurity study is hardly the first statistical measure in which the Bronx lands on the top — or, in reality, the bottom. The borough’s 14.1 percent  unemployment rate is the highest in the state. It is one of the poorest counties in the nation. And it was recently ranked the unhealthiest of New York’s 62 counties. “If you look at rates of obesity, diabetes, poor access to grocery stores, poverty rates, unemployment and hunger measures, the Bronx lights up on all of those,” said Triada Stampas of the Food Bank for New York City. “They’re all very much interconnected.”

Http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html

THE OBESITY-HUNGER PARADOX by SAM DOLNICK

When most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk. But a recent survey found that the most severe hungerrelated problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.

Call it the Bronx Paradox. “Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.” The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan.

But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average.

Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. “When you’re just trying to get your calorie intake, you’re going to get what fills your belly,” said Mr. Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” “And that may make you heavier even as you’re really struggling to secure enough food.”

Bloomberg administration officials see hunger and obesity as linked problems that can be addressed in part by making healthful food more affordable. “It’s a subtle, complicated link, but they’re very much linked, so the strategic response needs to be linked in various ways,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “We tackle the challenge on three fronts — providing income supports, increasing healthy options and encouraging nutritious behavior.”

To that end, the city offers a Health Bucks program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets by giving them an extra $2 coupon for every $5 spent there. The city has also created initiatives to send carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables to poor neighborhoods, and to draw grocery stores carrying fresh fruit and produce to low-income areas by offering them tax credits and other incentives.

But the Bronx’s hunger and obesity problems are not simply related to the lack of fresh food. Experts point to a swirling combination of factors that are tied to, and exacerbated by, poverty. Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.” Indeed, the food insecurity study is hardly the first statistical measure in which the Bronx lands on the top — or, in reality, the bottom. The borough’s 14.1 percent  unemployment rate is the highest in the state. It is one of the poorest counties in the nation. And it was recently ranked the unhealthiest of New York’s 62 counties. “If you look at rates of obesity, diabetes, poor access to grocery stores, poverty rates, unemployment and hunger measures, the Bronx lights up on all of those,” said Triada Stampas of the Food Bank for New York City. “They’re all very much interconnected.”

Http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html

It’s less precise than Fahrenheit — but that’s what’s so great about it

A little over a decade ago, I moved to Montreal expecting, perhaps foolishly, that I would become fluent in French. It was a goal that proved elusive — I just couldn’t master the Quebecois accent, which was almost inscrutably nasal compared with the Parisian French I learned in high school. I stuttered through one quotidian exchange after another, painfully aware I was marking myself as a clumsy outsider. It was exhausting. Somewhat chastened, I gave up on French and turned my attention to a new language: Celsius.
I gravitated toward Celsius for the same reason I had wanted to learn French: to experience the world through a foreign filter. Besides, I didn’t really have a choice. Montreal is a bilingual city, but it uses just one temperature scale: Celsius. Of course, the same is true in every country aside from the United States and a few other global superpowers like the Cayman Islands and Belize. Using Fahrenheit in Canada was a sure way to brand myself not only as a recalcitrant American but also as a maniac.
My hope was to internalize Celsius, not just to learn it but to feel it in my American flesh. The first thing I did to acquaint myself with it was to memorize relative temperatures scattered throughout the scale so I could extrapolate from them. I was already aware, as most people are, that what I knew as 32 was 0, but I also came up with a few useful way stations: 10 in Celsius was 50 Fahrenheit; 21 was 70; 30 was 86. With this loose constellation of data points, I could safely guess that 15 degrees C, say, was about 60 degrees F, without constantly cross-referencing between the scales.
When I started walking around with Celsius in my head, I noticed that such minor gradations don’t really matter — it was hot, or it was cold, or it was neither. I would survive. There was something psychically soothing about that.
This was especially true in Montreal, that giant ice floe of an island whose winters are so brutal that Celsius often served, for me, as a kind of safeguard against overreaction. When I saw that it was -10 degrees C, for example, I somehow took comfort in the notion that that was really just 14 degrees F, even though each scale was measuring the same thing. The shield held for the most part, except on those rare mornings when the air temperature nose-dived to around 40 below, where Celsius and Fahrenheit finally collide.

When I moved back to the United States about seven years ago, I got an iPhone and changed my weather app to Celsius. It annoyed my friends, who thought I was being pretentious (I was). Still, I think there was more to it than that. Being around people who used Fahrenheit made me feel as if it were sort of extreme.
I don’t mean to be dramatic. I wasn’t losing my mind. Far from it. After years of compulsively checking the weather multiple times a day, what happened was I started trusting my instincts and abandoned the forecast altogether. Celsius, I came to realize, had put me in touch with nature; it had forced me to spend my time walking around feeling the temperature without feeling the scale I was using to gauge the temperature.
In my heathen state, I’ve come to believe that all temperature scales are, for daily reference, sort of useless, or at least unnecessary. They present the semblance of control over your immediate environment, and yet they also distance you from experiencing the world unfiltered by some random metric. The weather is much less worrisome, I’ve found, when you aren’t constantly taking its temperature.
Source: The NYT Magazine, Feb. 28, 2018.

Four reasons why I won’t buy the iPhone X
The iPhone X fails to impress me in many ways. Although it’s the most impressive device Apple has built, it does have a number of flaws that are big enough to convince me to stay away from it and get a competing Android handset instead.
_______(I)_________, plenty of publications _______(II)_________ all the great features of Apple’s new flagship including its large bezel-less display, upgraded processor, and the addition of wireless charging. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in all the excitement, but if you take a step back and have an honest look at the new device, you’ll quickly realize that the iPhone X isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
It definitely has its faults, which we’ll take a closer look at in this post. Here are four reasons why I won’t buy the iPhone X.

1. It doesn’t have the X factor
The iPhone X is packed with the latest technology. It has a dual-camera setup on the back, a bezel-less display, a powerful chipset, and also supports wireless charging. The problem is that these things aren’t really new, as they are already present on a number of Android smartphones.
The truth is that the new iPhone lacks the X factor, which is at least one unique feature that would make it stand out from the crowd. Just look at the Android world: the Galaxy S8 has the curved display, the Note 8 comes equipped with the S Pen, Motorola’s high-end handsets have Moto Mods and the Shatter Shield display, and the OnePlus 5 has Dash Charge. These features give the devices a competitive edge over their rivals and can really influence consumers’ purchasing decisions.

2. It’s way too expensive
Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy Note 8 last month that shocked the public with its high price tag of $929. However, starting at $999, the new iPhone almost makes the Note 8 look like a bargain.
It’s the most expensive iPhone to date and based on what it brings to the table compared to the competition, it’s kind of hard — almost impossible — to justify its high price. To have a better idea of just how expensive the iPhone X is, compare it with some of the other high-end smartphones on the market nowadays.

3. There’s no fingerprint scanner on board
Apple’s business strategy seems a bit weird. Instead of adding features to its devices, the company is actually removing them. After ditching the headphone jack last year, the tech giant is back with another bold move: the iPhone X doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner.
The security feature that has become standard on most high-end and mid-range smartphones is replaced by Face ID, which is Apple’s new face recognition technology. To unlock the iPhone, you have to lift it up to your face, make sure the camera is pointing at you, and then swipe up. Unlocking with a scan of the finger is much quicker and easier.

4. It doesn’t look sexy
Let’s face it, design is important — no one wants an ugly smartphone. While I wouldn’t call the iPhone X ugly, I also wouldn’t call it good-looking. The overall design of the device could be described as bland. It definitely doesn’t stand out from the crowd, and is, to be honest, a bit boring.
The first thing I have a problem with is the notch on the top that houses the camera, the proximity sensor, and so forth. I’d rather see a slightly larger bezel on top like on the Note 8 or V30, as it just looks a lot more stylish in my opinion. Aside from that, there really aren’t a lot of bad things to say about the front of the smartphone. I do like the screen-to-body ratio that makes the large device a lot more compact.
www.androidauthority.com

Stephen Hawking recently said he knows what happened before the Big Bang. Other times, he blew our minds.

      Famed physicist Stephen Hawking definitively answered one of humankind's grandest questions last week — What was around before the Big Bang? "Nothing was around," Hawking told astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson March 10 on his show StarTalk.
    Saying he uses a "Euclidean approach to quantum gravity to describe the beginning of the universe," Hawking goes deep into what that actually means. A degree in astrophysics will help you understand, but he makes a concise point about the Big Bang, which happened nearly 14 billion years ago.
     "The Euclidean space-time is a closed surface without end, like the surface of the Earth," he said. "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole so there was nothing around before the Big Bang."
      Hawking would regularly blow our minds with his theories on what happened and what's to come in our universe. Last year, he explained how we humans may have about 100 years left on Earth. Then there was his prediction Earth would become a "ball of fire" within about 600 years.
From: https://goo.gl/S4bQP2. Accessed on 04/25/2018