Questões de Inglês

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Exercising… but how?

    We all know that, for optimal health, we need to move. But research and anecdotal experience indicate that people rarely exercise if they do not enjoy it. Workouts, for many, are something like possessions: If they don’t spark joy, they tend to be discarded.

    Most experts agree that a workout’s intensity and its duration have the greatest influence on our feelings about it. In recent years, attention has been focused on short, intense workouts, typically called high-intensity interval training, because the duration is so slight, lessening the likelihood that people will be too busy to exercise. But while many people who take up high-intensity interval training report being pleased by the workouts’ brevity, they often also say that the intensity is not fun for them, which, over the long term, could discourage them from continuing.

    In a new study, researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria decided to investigate whether emphasizing a workout´s length while playing down its intensity might increase people’s enjoyment and, potentially, participation. To find out, they recruited about 40 healthy men and women and asked them to complete a series of detailed questionnaires about their moods and level of anxiety, both at that moment and in general. Then they asked each volunteer to complete several prolonged workouts.

    One of these involved hiking in the mountains. Wearing heart rate monitors, the volunteers walked in groups of three or four along a popular mountain trail that climbs sinuously and persistently; they were told to move at a brisk but not punishing pace, so that they were breathing rapidly but could converse with one another. Midway through the hike, they stopped and told researchers how strenuous the walking had felt, on a scale of 1 to 20, before descending and repeating the questionnaires about their moods. The entire walk lasted about three hours.

    On a separate day, each volunteer completed virtually the same workout on a treadmill at a gym. The machines’ inclines were set to simulate the uphill hike for the first half of the workout, with flat walking after that (since the machines could not be set for negative altitude gain). Volunteers walked next to one another and were encouraged to chat. They all also completed the estimations of effort and mood.

    Then on a final day, as a control session, they all sat for about three hours in a communal room at the university equipped with computers, magazines and couches, where they could surf or talk and, before and after, assess their moods. At the end, the scientists compared their mood scores and other assessments.

    Although the mountain hiking turned out to have been, objectively, the most strenuous of the workouts, interestingly, almost all the participants reported that the outdoor effort had felt less strenuous to them than their time on the treadmill. And their mood scores were much higher after the outdoor hike than the treadmill workout. On the other hand, the long walk in the gym had left them almost uniformly happier and more relaxed than after sitting and using a computer or chatting for several hours. These results could have particular resonance for people who have tried brief, intense workouts and disliked them. But, of course, this study looked only at a single instance of each workout: it did not follow people to see if they would voluntarily keep walking or measure the extent to which the prolonged hikes affected their health and fitness.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 28.06.2017. Adaptado.)

The word “although”, which opens the seventh paragraph, introduces the idea of

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Exercising… but how?

    We all know that, for optimal health, we need to move. But research and anecdotal experience indicate that people rarely exercise if they do not enjoy it. Workouts, for many, are something like possessions: If they don’t spark joy, they tend to be discarded.

    Most experts agree that a workout’s intensity and its duration have the greatest influence on our feelings about it. In recent years, attention has been focused on short, intense workouts, typically called high-intensity interval training, because the duration is so slight, lessening the likelihood that people will be too busy to exercise. But while many people who take up high-intensity interval training report being pleased by the workouts’ brevity, they often also say that the intensity is not fun for them, which, over the long term, could discourage them from continuing.

    In a new study, researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria decided to investigate whether emphasizing a workout´s length while playing down its intensity might increase people’s enjoyment and, potentially, participation. To find out, they recruited about 40 healthy men and women and asked them to complete a series of detailed questionnaires about their moods and level of anxiety, both at that moment and in general. Then they asked each volunteer to complete several prolonged workouts.

    One of these involved hiking in the mountains. Wearing heart rate monitors, the volunteers walked in groups of three or four along a popular mountain trail that climbs sinuously and persistently; they were told to move at a brisk but not punishing pace, so that they were breathing rapidly but could converse with one another. Midway through the hike, they stopped and told researchers how strenuous the walking had felt, on a scale of 1 to 20, before descending and repeating the questionnaires about their moods. The entire walk lasted about three hours.

    On a separate day, each volunteer completed virtually the same workout on a treadmill at a gym. The machines’ inclines were set to simulate the uphill hike for the first half of the workout, with flat walking after that (since the machines could not be set for negative altitude gain). Volunteers walked next to one another and were encouraged to chat. They all also completed the estimations of effort and mood.

    Then on a final day, as a control session, they all sat for about three hours in a communal room at the university equipped with computers, magazines and couches, where they could surf or talk and, before and after, assess their moods. At the end, the scientists compared their mood scores and other assessments.

    Although the mountain hiking turned out to have been, objectively, the most strenuous of the workouts, interestingly, almost all the participants reported that the outdoor effort had felt less strenuous to them than their time on the treadmill. And their mood scores were much higher after the outdoor hike than the treadmill workout. On the other hand, the long walk in the gym had left them almost uniformly happier and more relaxed than after sitting and using a computer or chatting for several hours. These results could have particular resonance for people who have tried brief, intense workouts and disliked them. But, of course, this study looked only at a single instance of each workout: it did not follow people to see if they would voluntarily keep walking or measure the extent to which the prolonged hikes affected their health and fitness.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 28.06.2017. Adaptado.)

In the excerpt from the third paragraph “Then they asked each volunteer to complete several prolonged workouts”, the word in bold refers to

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Once fat cells are formed, can you ever get rid of them?

    The number of fat cells in a person’s body seems to be able to change in only one direction: up. Fat cell number increases through childhood and adolescence and generally stabilizes in adulthood.

    But this doesn’t mean that fat cells, or adipocytes, are stagnant. The size of individual fat cells is remarkably variable, expanding and contracting with weight gain or weight loss. And as with most cell types in the body, adipocytes die eventually. “Usually when old ones die, they are replaced by new fat cells,” said Dr. Michael Jensen, an endocrinologist and obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic. Cell death and production appear to be tightly coupled, so although about 10 percent of adipocytes die each year, they’re replaced at the same rate.

    Even among bariatric surgery patients, who can lose massive amounts of weight, the number of fat cells tends to remain the same, although the cells shrink in size, studies show. Liposuction reduces the number of fat cells in a person’s body, but studies show the weight lost is typically regained within a year. It isn’t known whether this regain occurs through the production of new fat cells or expansion of existing ones.

    People who are obese tend to have more fat cells than those who are not, and several studies have found an increase in fat cell number with weight regain following weight loss. The fact that fat cell number can be increased but not decreased most likely contributes to the body’s drive to regain weight after weight loss, said Dr. Kirsty L. Spalding, a cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the lead author of a 2008 study showing that fat cells die and are replaced. Beyond their role in storing fat, adipocytes secrete proteins and hormones that affect energy metabolism.

 (Alice Callahan. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com, 17.02.2017. Adaptado.)

De acordo com o último parágrafo do texto, é correto afirmar que os adipócitos

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Once fat cells are formed, can you ever get rid of them?

    The number of fat cells in a person’s body seems to be able to change in only one direction: up. Fat cell number increases through childhood and adolescence and generally stabilizes in adulthood.

    But this doesn’t mean that fat cells, or adipocytes, are stagnant. The size of individual fat cells is remarkably variable, expanding and contracting with weight gain or weight loss. And as with most cell types in the body, adipocytes die eventually. “Usually when old ones die, they are replaced by new fat cells,” said Dr. Michael Jensen, an endocrinologist and obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic. Cell death and production appear to be tightly coupled, so although about 10 percent of adipocytes die each year, they’re replaced at the same rate.

    Even among bariatric surgery patients, who can lose massive amounts of weight, the number of fat cells tends to remain the same, although the cells shrink in size, studies show. Liposuction reduces the number of fat cells in a person’s body, but studies show the weight lost is typically regained within a year. It isn’t known whether this regain occurs through the production of new fat cells or expansion of existing ones.

    People who are obese tend to have more fat cells than those who are not, and several studies have found an increase in fat cell number with weight regain following weight loss. The fact that fat cell number can be increased but not decreased most likely contributes to the body’s drive to regain weight after weight loss, said Dr. Kirsty L. Spalding, a cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the lead author of a 2008 study showing that fat cells die and are replaced. Beyond their role in storing fat, adipocytes secrete proteins and hormones that affect energy metabolism.

 (Alice Callahan. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com, 17.02.2017. Adaptado.)

O terceiro parágrafo menciona cirurgia bariátrica e lipoaspiração como procedimentos para perda de peso.

 

Segundo informações do parágrafo,

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    The power of a billion: India’s genomics revolution

 

    India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality – and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world’s population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases. In a similar vein, 81% of the world’s genomic information has been collected from people with European ancestry.

    At the same time, there’s a growing interest in developing new, more effective therapies tailored to an individual’s genetic make up – an idea known as precision or personalised medicine. Missing out on mapping worldwide genetic diversity is a big mistake, according to Sumit Jamuar, chief executive of Global Gene Corp. It’s a company aiming to democratise healthcare by capturing anonymised genetic data from populations around the world and share it with the global community of academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. It will start by focusing on populations in South Asia.

    “Healthcare is broken,” Mr Jamuar says. “We spend $1 trillion on drugs every year, of which 40% or more are deemed to be ineffective. We realised that with the power and possibility of genomics and precision medicine, you can change the health outcome for any individual and allow them to have not just a longer but a better quality of life. What was lacking was genomic data to realise that promise, and that’s what we’ve set out to achieve.”

    As deaths from infectious diseases fall, particularly in the developing world, there’s a rise in chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes – something the World Health Organization has described as a “slow-motion catastrophe”. Treatments for these conditions are moving away from “one size fits all”, becoming more precisely targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup. Yet these drugs are currently designed and tested on the basis of predominantly “pale and male” genomic information, and may not work for people with regional variations in their DNA.

    Mr Jamuar believes the key to fixing this problem lies in gathering genetic data - as much of it as possible – along with harnessing the technical tools to analyse and share it. “If we take the example of GPS technology, it used to just provide longitude and latitude. Now we have Google maps and that has changed everything,” he explains. “It allows us not to focus on what goes on underneath the technology, but how we can use it to navigate our way round the world. What we want to do is create a high-fidelity genomic map of the world. And instead of looking for things like restaurants or traffic in a city, we can look at mutations or diseases in different areas.”

 (Kat Arney. www.bbc.com, 22.06.2017. Adaptado.)

No trecho do último parágrafo “as much of it as possible – along with harnessing the technical tools to analyse and share it”, a expressão em destaque implica

O texto de Percival de Lima Souto refere-se aos festivais da canção e das “músicas de protesto”.

 

Considerando o contexto histórico dos anos 1960 e 1970, é correto afirmar que