Questões de Inglês

10 YEARS AFTER AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH,

AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING

ISSIE LAPOWSKY SCIENCE 05.24.16 6:50 AM

AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. “Spring.”

   Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainly sprung—early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him. These kinds of numbers— and the scary story they tell about the future of Earth—have been Gore’s chief motivation since he failed to win the presidency in 2000. Gore emerged from that weird, disputed election armed with what is now possibly the most famous slide¬show in human history. He has traveled the world delivering that deck to hundreds of people at a time, showing in irrefutable detail just how mind-bogglingly badly we have treated our planet and what we might be able to do about it.

   Ten years ago, the slide¬show became An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that spread those ideas to millions. Gore says he still tinkers with the slide¬show every day, because, well, the numbers keep changing. Not always for the better. Yet this year Gore and his fellow activists have a rare reason to celebrate. In April, 175 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to sign the Paris Agreement, a global pact that aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, a decade after his movie sounded the alarm about climate change and 16 years after he ran for president, it looks like Al Gore might finally be … winning?

  WIRED: Why did you want to make An Inconvenient Truth?

 GORE: I have to admit to you that initially I did not want to do a documentary.

  What? Why not?

 It’s a dumb reason. I didn’t think a slide¬show could translate into a movie. (…) Participant Media and Davis Guggenheim had to convince me it was a good idea, and I’m so glad they found ways to reveal to me the depths of my ignorance about moviemaking. It’s a message that has to be heard. Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, but the future of human civilization is at stake.

 The Paris Agreement must feel like a big point of progress.

  It really does. Sometimes in sports you can sense a palpable shift in the momentum of the contest. A team will be behind on the scoreboard, but the shift in momentum is so obvious and dramatic that you just have the feeling they’re going to win. That’s where we are in solving the climate crisis. We’re still behind on the scoreboard, but the momentum has shifted. We are winning

   When renewable electricity becomes cheaper than electricity that comes from burning coal or gas, then that changes everything. The marketplace makes it the default option, and you get what you saw in the world in 2015—90 percent of the new electricity generated in the world last year was from renewables. That is an astonishing change. The Paris Agreement exceeded the upper range of my expectations. Does it go far enough? No, of course not. Can it be improved? Yes, it’s designed to be constantly improved, and that’s what I’m focused on now.

  You’ve been at this a long time. Was it lonely fighting for this stuff in government in the 1980s and 1990s?

    It was certainly a different time and a different environment. But I don’t ever remember feeling lonely, because I was always focused on reaching more and more people. Building a global grassroots movement is really the only way to solve this, because so many political systems have been captured by legacy industries. And that influence over policymaking has to be counterbalanced by a grassroots awareness.

  It’s sometimes tough for people to get climate change because they’re not seeing its effects every day—or at least they don’t realize they are. What have you seen that has stuck with you?

  In March, I went to Tacloban in the Philippines and talked with survivors there who endured the ravages of Super Typhoon Haiyan. When you see how their lives were utterly transformed and feel the painful losses they suffered, it certainly will stick with you. I conducted a training in Miami last fall during one of the highest high tides and saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale on a sunny day.

  You talk a lot about “winning” the fight against climate change. How do you define a win?

  Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences that could utterly disrupt the future of human civilization. It means bending the curves downward so that the global warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphere and begins to reduce in volume. It means creating tens of millions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transform energy systems and install advanced batteries, to transform agriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of our civilization.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-al-gore-climate-change/ Access October 16, 2016. Adapted.

 ‘I did not want to make a documentary’, said Al Gore, referring to:

TEXTO:

  Jurassic Park’s iconic image of a fossilized blood

filled mosquito was thought to be fiction — until now. For

the first time, researchers have identified a fossil of a 

female mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged 

[5] abdomen. A team led by Dale Greenwalt at the US 

National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC 

reported the fossil discovery in Proceedings of the 

National Academy of Sciences. 

  Although scientists have found fossils of suspected 

[10] blood-sucking insects, the creatures’ feeding habits have 

mostly been inferred from their anatomy or the presence 

of blood-borne parasites in their guts. But Greenwalt’s 

fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong 

evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back 

[15] to 46 million years ago. It is a fortunate find. “The abdomen 

of a blood-engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to 

burst. It is very fragile,” says Greenwalt. “The chances 

that it wouldn’t have disintegrated prior to fossilization 

were infinitesimally small.” 

[20]   The insect was found not in amber, as depicted 

in Jurassic Park, but in shale rock sediments from 

Montana. After 46 million years, any DNA would be long 

degraded, but other molecules can survive. Greenwalt’s 

team showed that the insect’s abdomen still contains 

[25] large traces of iron and the organic molecule porphyrin 

— both constituents of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying 

pigment found in vertebrate blood. These molecules were 

either rare or absent in the abdomen of a fossilized male 

mosquito (which does not drink blood) of the same age, 

[30] found at the same location. “This shows that details of a 

blood-sucking mosquito can be nicely preserved in a 

medium other than amber,” says George Poinar, who 

studies fossilized insects at Oregon State University in 

Corvallis. “It also shows that some porphyrin compounds 

[35] in vertebrate blood can survive under the right conditions 

for millions of years.” 

YOUNG. Ed. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 24 jun. 2016.

The text says that DNA

TEXTO:

  Jurassic Park’s iconic image of a fossilized blood

filled mosquito was thought to be fiction — until now. For

the first time, researchers have identified a fossil of a 

female mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged 

[5] abdomen. A team led by Dale Greenwalt at the US 

National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC 

reported the fossil discovery in Proceedings of the 

National Academy of Sciences. 

  Although scientists have found fossils of suspected 

[10] blood-sucking insects, the creatures’ feeding habits have 

mostly been inferred from their anatomy or the presence 

of blood-borne parasites in their guts. But Greenwalt’s 

fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong 

evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back 

[15] to 46 million years ago. It is a fortunate find. “The abdomen 

of a blood-engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to 

burst. It is very fragile,” says Greenwalt. “The chances 

that it wouldn’t have disintegrated prior to fossilization 

were infinitesimally small.” 

[20]   The insect was found not in amber, as depicted 

in Jurassic Park, but in shale rock sediments from 

Montana. After 46 million years, any DNA would be long 

degraded, but other molecules can survive. Greenwalt’s 

team showed that the insect’s abdomen still contains 

[25] large traces of iron and the organic molecule porphyrin 

— both constituents of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying 

pigment found in vertebrate blood. These molecules were 

either rare or absent in the abdomen of a fossilized male 

mosquito (which does not drink blood) of the same age, 

[30] found at the same location. “This shows that details of a 

blood-sucking mosquito can be nicely preserved in a 

medium other than amber,” says George Poinar, who 

studies fossilized insects at Oregon State University in 

Corvallis. “It also shows that some porphyrin compounds 

[35] in vertebrate blood can survive under the right conditions 

for millions of years.” 

YOUNG. Ed. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 24 jun. 2016.

Fill in the parentheses with T (True) or F (False).

About the fossilized mosquito, its correct to say:

( ) This is the first time that the fossil of a surpected blood-feeding insect has been found.

( ) The fossilized mosquito contains traces of the blood of an unknown ancient creature.

( ) It’s not old enough to be filled with dinosaur blood.

( ) The findings are definitive evidence that the fossilized mosquito had blood in its belly.

The correct sequence, from top to bottom, is

TEXTO:

  Traffic light-coded food labels indicating how much

fat, salt and sugar an item contains are to appear on

most food that is eaten in Britain in a move hailed by 

health campaigners as ending shoppers’ confusion over 

[5] what to buy. 

  All the main supermarket chains and some of the 

biggest producers of snack food, such as PepsiCo and 

Nestlé, have agreed with ministers to use front-of-pack 

nutritional labels colored red, amber or green on some 

[10] or all of their products in an effort to make it easier for 

consumers to choose healthier options. 

  The traffic-light labels, which many food 

campaigners and medical organizations have long called 

for, will be part of a new hybrid nutritional labeling scheme 

[15] that combines them with guideline daily amounts (GDAs), 

which doctors have criticized as deceptive and utterly 

baffling to most consumers. 

  The new labels are intended to help shoppers know 

at a glance whether a product contains a low (green), 

[20] medium (amber) or high (red) amount of fat, saturated 

fat, salt, sugar and calories. The labels are not designed 

to demonize foods with lots of reds but to have people 

consider what they are eating and make sure it’s part of 

a balanced diet. “Businesses that have signed up to using 

[25] the new label today already account for more than 60% 

of the food that is sold in the UK,” a spokesman added. 

  The UK public health minister, Anna Soubry, said 

shoppers were confused by existing food labels: 

“Research shows that, of all the current schemes, people 

[30] like this [hybrid] label the most and can use the 

information to make healthier choices.” 

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 12 out. 2016.

As far as food labels are concerned, Anna Soubry says that shoppers prefer the one that uses ________ GDAs ______ traffic light-coded labels.

The alternative that suitably completes these blanks is

TEXTO:

  Coffee isn’t just warm and energizing, it may also 

be extremely good for you. In recent years and decades, 

scientists have studied the effects of coffee on various 

aspects of health and their results have been nothing 

[5] short of amazing. 

  Coffee doesn’t just keep you awake, it may literally 

make you smarter as well. The active ingredient in coffee 

is caffeine, which is a stimulant and the most commonly 

consumed psychoactive substance in the world. 

[10] Caffeine’s primary mechanism in the brain is blocking 

the effects of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called 

Adenosine. By blocking the inhibitory effects of 

Adenosine, caffeine actually increases neuronal firing in 

the brain and the release of other neurotransmitters like 

[15] dopamine and norepinephrine. Many controlled trials have 

examined the effects of caffeine on the brain, 

demonstrating that caffeine can improve mood, reaction 

time, memory, vigilance and general cognitive function. 

  There’s a good reason why you will find caffeine in 

[20] most commercial fat burning supplements. Caffeine, 

partly due to its stimulant effect on the central nervous 

system, both raises metabolism and increases the 

oxidation of fatty acids. Caffeine can also improve athletic 

performance by several mechanisms, including by 

[25] mobilizing fatty acids from the fat tissues. 

  Type II diabetes is a lifestyle-related disease 

that has reached epidemic proportions, having increased 

10-fold in a few decades and now afflicting about 300 

million people. In observational studies, coffee has been 

[30] repeatedly associated with a lower risk of diabetes. The 

reduction in risk ranges from 23% all the way up to 67%. 

A massive review article looked at 18 studies with a total 

of 457.922 participants. Each additional cup of coffee 

per day lowered the risk of diabetes by 7%. The more 

[35] coffee people drank, the lower their risk. 

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 12 out. 2016.

Caffeine can improve ______________

According to the text, the alternative that does not complete this blank correctly is