Questões de Inglês

O texto a seguir é referência para a questão.

Mother-of-one left ‘disgusted’ by what she found when biting into her Chinese takeaway

  A mother-of-one was left disgusted after she bit into her Chinese takeaway and found what she claims was an earring in her rice.

  Abbie Lee was eating fried rice when she felt something hit her tooth before she pulled out a heart-shaped stud out of her mouth.

  The 21-year-old from Denbighshire, North East Wales, had even fed some of the rice to her 10-month-old daughter before making the grim discovery, the Daily Post reported.

  She explained she had ordered the takeaway on a Saturday night with her partner from the Ocean City in Rhyl.

  “I was eating my Yeung chow fried rice. I felt something hard against my tooth”, she said. “When I realised what it was, I was horrified and disgusted. It’s been in someone’s ear and was in my food which then went into my mouth. I couldn’t eat any more after that. It put me off my whole meal so we ended up throwing it all in the bin”.

  Abbie said she called the takeaway to complain and asked for a full refund.

  But, when the delivery driver returned to the address, she says she was only given £4 to cover the cost of the rice.

  “When I called up to complain, I spoke to a man who was very rude and refused to give me my money back in full”, she said.

  He even said he wanted the earring back after I’d been given a refund of £4.

  “I was so appalled that I contacted the Food Standards Agency and Denbighshire Council’s hygiene department”. “This has put me off Chinese food for life”.

(http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mother-one-left-disgusted-what-7832960)

Text

HUMANS IN CALIFORNIA 130,000 YEARS AGO? GET THE FACTS

National Geographic- April 26, 2017

  In an announcement sure to be polemic, researchers say they have found signs of ancient humans in California between 120,000 and 140,000 years ago—more than a hundred thousand years before humans were believed to exist anywhere in the Americas.

  ''I realize that 130,000 years is a really old date and makes our site the oldest archaeological site in the Americas,'' says study leader Tom Deméré, the paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, whose team describes their findings in Nature. ''Of course, extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence, and we believe the Cerutti mastodon site presents this evidence.''

  To be clear, the team has not found human bones at the site. But as Deméré and their colleagues tell it, their evidence—a mastodon skeleton, mastodon bone flakes, and several large stones—shows that the area was a ''bone quarry,'' where an unknown hominine supposedly smashed fresh mastodon bones with stone hammers, perhaps to extract marrow or to mine the skeleton for raw materials.

  However, many of the world‘s leading experts in American archaeology already have expressed some form of skepticism to the paper‘s claims. Some have rejected it completely.

  ''The earliest occupation of the Americas is a highly contentious subject,'' says University of Southampton archaeologist John McNabb. ''The date of the find at 130,000 years ago is a really big time difference for archaeologists who are used to talking about 12, 13, 14,000 years ago.

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 5 maio 2017. Adaptado.

Glossary: site: sítio (arqueológico); claim: afirmação; bone quarry: aglomeração de ossos; smashed: esmagados; hammers: martelos; marrow: medula óssea.

Text 

    Countries are finding that the urban economic development to which they aspire brings poisoned air, ill-health, massive costs, a low quality of life and, probably, an early death for a very great many people.

    That is the stark conclusion from a reading of the new database of outdoor air quality from the World Health Organisation (WHO), for 3,000 of the world‘s cities. While millions of people in rich countries suffer the cancers, heart and respiratory diseases that air pollution brings, the levels of air pollution in many Asian and African cities are said to be five or even 10 times worse.

    By not addressing air pollution now, governments, NGOs and individuals are storing up a health time bomb for the future, guaranteeing that hospital wards will be full of wheezing people with hearts and lungs permanently damaged just by living near busy roads or factories. The vast costs to the economy of caring for an increasingly infirm older population will have to be met later. Most governments and individuals still do not see air pollution as a major issue, but as one of the inevitable prices of economic development. They may easily understand that people die of malaria, obesity, alcohol or malnutrition, but may not appreciate the grave risks of air pollution.
    Yet it‘s the biggest killer in the world and likely to put the biggest brake on development in the future.
Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/may/12/air-pollution-health-timebomb-poses-a-major-threatto-development-who >. Accessed on 07 Sept. 2016 (adapted).

Glossary
stark: dura, severa; time bomb: bomba-relógio; wards: enfermarias; to wheeze: arquejar, respirar com dificuldade.

Question will be based on the text below. Read it carefully and then choose the best alternative that answers the question placed immediately after it.

Stem cell breakthrough may be simple, fast, cheap

§1  We run too hard, we fall down, we’re sick -- all of this puts stress on the cells in our bodies. But in what’s being called a breakthrough in regenerative medicine, researchers have found a way to make stem cells by purposely putting mature cells under stress.

§2  Two new studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature describe a method of taking mature cells from mice and turning them into embryonic-like stem cells, which can be coaxed into becoming any other kind of cell possible. One method effectively boils down to this: put the cells in an acidic environment.

§3  “I think the process we’ve described mimics Mother Nature,” said Dr. Charles Vacanti, director of the laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and senior author on one of the studies. “It’s a natural process that cells normally respond to.”

§4  Both studies represent a new step in the thriving science of stem cell research, which seeks to develop therapies to repair bodily damage and cure disease by being able to insert cells that can grow into whatever tissues or organs are needed. If you take an organ that’s functioning at 10% of normal and bring it up to 25% of functionality, that could greatly reduce the likelihood of fatality in that particular disease, Vacanti said.

§5  This method by Vacanti and his colleagues “is truly the simplest, cheapest, fastest method ever achieved for reprogramming cells,” said Jeff Karp, associate professor of medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital and principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He was not involved in the study

§6  Before the technique described in Nature, the leading candidates for creating stem cells artificially were those derived from embryos and stem cells from adult cells that require the insertion of DNA to become reprogrammable.

§7  Stem cells are created the natural way every time an egg that is fertilized begins to divide. During the first four to five days of cell division, so-called pluripotent stem cells develop. They have the ability to turn into any cell in the body. Removing stem cells from the embryo destroys it, which is why this type of research is controversial.

§8  Researchers have also developed a method of producing embryonic-like stem cells by taking a skin cell from a patient, for example, and adding a few bits of foreign DNA to reprogram the skin cell to become like an embryo and produce pluripotent cells, too. However, these cells are usually used for research because researchers do not want to give patients cells with extra DNA.

§9  The new method does not involve the destruction of embryos or inserting new genetic material into cells, Vacanti said. It also avoids the problem of rejection: The body may reject stem cells that came from other people, but this method uses an individual’s own mature cells.

§10  “It was really surprising to see that such a remarkable transformation could be triggered simply by stimuli from outside of the cell,” said Haruko Obokata of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan in a news conference this week.

§11  The process is called STAP, which stands for “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency.” Karp estimates that the method is five to 10 times faster than other means of reprogramming cells.

§12  Researchers used mice to study the STAP cell phenomenon. They genetically altered the mice donating stem cells to “label” those cells with the color green. For instance, they modified mice such that their cells would light up green in response to a particular wavelength of light.

§13  The scientists exposed blood cells from these genetically altered mice to an acidic environment. A few days later, they saw that these cells turned into the embryonic-like state and grew in spherical clusters.

§14  Scientists put the cell clusters into a mouse embryo that had not been genetically modified. It turned out, the implanted clusters could form tissues in all of the organs that the researchers tested. The scientists knew that the cells came from the original mouse because they turned green when exposed to a particular light.

§15  Besides modifying acidity, researchers also stressed the cells in other ways, such as lowering the oxygen environment and disrupting the cell membrane. Increasing acidity was one of the most effective methods of turning mouse blood cells into STAP cells.

§16  There are, of course, some caveats.

§17  For now, the STAP cell procedure has only been demonstrated in cells from young mice. Its effectiveness in humans, and the risks, are unknown.

§18  Researchers have not yet shown how STAP embryonic-like stem cells compare with bona fide embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells, Karp said. Also, although the study was “rigorous” and “well-controlled,” it did not demonstrate exactly why the stress on the cells caused them to become STAP cells, Karp said.

§19  As with everything in science, more research is required to confirm the findings and learn more about the implications. Vacanti hopes the process could get tested clinically in humans within three years. He noted that induced pluripotent stem cells are already being explored in Japan in humans and the same “platforms” could be utilized for STAP cells.

§20  STAP cells also have an additional property that embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells do not: They can become placental cells. Scientists can manipulate them to contribute to tissues of either the embryo or the placenta.

§21  What therapeutic purpose growing more placenta could serve, Vacanti isn’t sure -- unless, that is, you wanted to create an embryo and bring it to term.But that’s not the goal of this research. Vacanti and colleagues want to explore possible ties to cancer from the STAP cell process; it could potentially help to model the process by which cells become cancerous and explore if there is a way to reverse the process.

§22  Stem cell research as a field has been growing at “lightning speed,” Karp said. New reprogramming approaches to stem cells are emerging all the time, he said, and this one in particular “looks incredibly promising.”

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/29/health/stem-cell-discovery/

Read the text below and answer the following question based on it.

History behind ‘An apple a day’

Apples have long been associated with a healthful diet. The fruit is low in calories and sodium, and high in fiber and Vitamin C.

But just how long ago did humans coin the adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”?

“It sounds as if it should be really old, but in fact the first recorded use is in the 1860s, when it is said to be an old saying from Pembrokeshire in Wales,” said Caroline Taggart, author of “An Apple a Day: Old-Fashioned Proverbs and Why They Still Work.”

The original phrase, Taggart said, was, ‘‘Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.” In the 19th century and early 20th, the phrase evolved to “an apple a day, no doctor to pay” and “an apple a day sends the doctor away,” while the phrasing now commonly used was first recorded in 1922.

Although the term is fairly new, Taggart said, the concept is quite old. Ancient Romans and Anglo-Saxons, she said, knew about the healthful properties of apples. The fruit also pops up in traditional Ayurvedic medicine, dating back about 1,500 years in southern Asia.

The popularity of the phrase has not been lost on modern science, either. Researchers and doctors have conducted numerous studies on the health benefits of apples — exploring whether they can actually reduce trips to the doctor.

In 2012, an Ohio State University study found that eating an apple a day helped significantly lower levels of bad cholesterol in middle-aged adults, and in 2011 a Dutch study found that eating apples and pears might help prevent strokes.

The longevity of the phrase “an apple a day,” Taggart explained, comes from its simplicity.

“One of the odd things about this proverb is that it means exactly what it says,” Taggart said. “Apples are good for you. That may be why ‘an apple a day’ is popular. You can take it at face value.”
Disponível em: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/history-behindan-apple-a-day/2013/09/24/aac3e79c-1f0e-11e3-94a2- 6c66b668ea55_story.html?utm_term=.ab71f89e4a0a

Read the text below and answer the following question based on it.

Could a placebo help heal a broken heart?

The placebo effect is an amazing phenomenon. As we have previously reported, placebos can help with everything from losing weight to improving your vision. And, according to this study, they may even help mend a broken heart. Here, researchers recruited participants who had been dumped in the last six months, and gave them a saline nose-spray that they claimed either was “effective in reducing emotional pain” (the placebo group) or a routine part of fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) imaging (the control group). Next, the researchers conducted fMRI imaging of the subjects’ brains while showing them photos of their ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, and asking the subjects to recall their breakups. The result? Subjects in the placebo nose spray group experienced less social pain when remembering their exes compared with those in the control. Let’s just hope those participants were well compensated!
Adaptado de: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/2017/05/04/c ould-a-placebo-help-heal-a-broken-heart/#.WRNtsdLyvIU Acessado em 7 de maio de 2017.