Questões de Inglês

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    More children have died of leukaemia since large soya plantations have gradually replaced cattle farms in parts of Brazil, suggesting that pesticide exposure could be involved. However, the number of deaths is low and the exact cause hasn’t been determined.

    Over the past two decades, parts of the Amazon have experienced a 20-fold expansion of soya farming, with previously cleared cow pastures converted into croplands. In the Cerrado, a vast savannah region which neighbours the Amazon, such farming has tripled.

    Southern Brazil has a long-standing soya farming industry, with a transition in land use taking place more recently in the north and centre of the country. Brazil overall uses more pesticides than anywhere else. While carrying out agricultural research in the Amazon, Marin Skidmore at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign heard local people talking about a recent rise in childhood cancers, with previous research linking pesticide exposure to childhood leukaemia. “I wanted to see whether this phenomenon that I was hearing about on the ground would really bear out in the data,” she says.         Skidmore and her colleagues collected information about deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia in children under 10 years old – who usually develop a form of the condition called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – between 2004 and 2019 in rural areas of the Cerrado and Amazon, covering about 1.75 million square kilometres.

    Healthcare workers in these places don’t necessarily report all lymphoid leukaemia diagnoses to government databases, says Skidmore. The researchers therefore focused on deaths, which were well documented, she says.

    They compared that information with data about land use and the location of people’s homes relative to water sources and paediatric oncology centres.

    The team found that for every 10 per cent increase in land used for soya farming, there were an additional 0.4 lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths of children under 5 years old per 10,000 people and an additional 0.21 such deaths for children under 10 per 10,000 people. A statistical analysis indicates this wasn’t a chance finding. Death rates were higher in areas more than 100 kilometres away from a paediatric oncology centre. This makes sense, since ALL in particular is “a highly treatable cancer”, says Skidmore. Looking specifically at children who were born after the soya farming surge began in 2004, approximately half of the 226 deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia may not have occurred without the growth of that industry, she says.

    Critically, the team found that lymphoid leukaemia-related death rates were especially associated with living downstream from a soya farm, which suggests the children, or their mothers during pregnancy, may have been consuming pesticide-laced water. Previous research has linked pesticide exposure during pregnancy to cancer in infants.

    The results don’t prove that pesticides from soya farming caused the deaths, but “I buy it”, says Pablo Menéndez at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. Nevertheless, the number of lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths is very low overall, he says.

    Chensheng (Alex) Lu at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, says that while the correlation between the deaths and the soya farming expansion seems clear, the cause isn’t definite. If the results are confirmed in further research, this will underline the importance of government-regulated pesticide policies, says Skidmore. These could include training protocols for anyone applying pesticides and access to competent healthcare to ensure early diagnoses and accessible treatment, especially for rural populations, she says.

    Agricultural intensification, via widespread pesticide use, is probably going to be part of global food security strategies, says Skidmore, who is “not advocating for a wholesale stop to these inputs”. “I think, safety first – making sure public health is taken care of as we see potentially more intensification happening in regions that are potentially under-resourced or haven’t seen these types of chemicals in the past,” she says.

New Scientist. 2 November 2023. Adapted.

Text for question

    Chemicals used in hundreds of products known as phthalates have been linked to emotional and behavioral development issues in 24-month-old-boys who were exposed during the first trimester of pregnancy, according to a new study by Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) researchers.

    “Our findings, published in NeuroToxicology, underscore the potential impact of maternal exposure to phthalates on children’s emotional and behavioral development, particularly among boys,” says Liron Cohen-Eliraz, a Ph.D. student who conducted the research as part of her dissertation. “Our study adds to the growing body of evidence highlighting the need for greater environmental awareness and action to minimize exposure to harmful chemicals during pregnancy.”

    Phthalates are a group of chemicals used to make plastics more durable. Known as the “everywhere plastic,” the ubiquitous chemical is used in vinyl flooring, lubricating oils, and personal-care products (soaps, shampoos, hair sprays) and elsewhere.

    Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) such as phthalates cross the placenta and, when absorbed into the prenatal body, can either mimic or block female hormones, or in males, suppress the hormones involved in male sexual development.

    The study involved recruiting pregnant women between 11 and 18 weeks of gestation, and analyzing their spot urine samples for phthalate metabolites (DEHP, DiNP, and MBzBP). The researchers later assessed developmental and behavioral offspring progress at 24 months of age using well-established maternal report measures including CBCL, ASQ-3, and HOME questionnaires.

    The results revealed noteworthy gender-specific associations. Specifically, the study found that boys exposed to higher DEHP levels during the first trimester had lower developmental scores in personal social abilities, as measured by the ASQ-3 questionnaire.

    Moreover, these toddler aged boys exhibited higher in internalizing, including emotionally reactive, anxiety or depression scores, and somatic complaints, as well as externalizing problems.

    Although phthalates were found in 98% of the mother’s urine specimens, no differences were observed in high or low levels of girls’ exposure to varied DEHP levels during pregnancy. Continued research in this field is crucial to further understand the long-term implications of endocrine disrupting chemicals on human health and development.

American Friends of the Hebrew University (AFHU). 24 August 2023. Adapted.

The following text refers to question.

Shōgun: The brutal Japanese history that inspired 2024’s latest TV hit

    There’s a stomach-churning moment in the debut episode of FX/Disney+’s Shōgun that sets the standard for the kind of brutality surely to follow. Having endured starvation, scurvy, and a captain’s suicide aboard a ravaged Dutch trade ship, pilot major John Blackthorne and his surviving crew are shipwrecked off the coast of Anjiro, only to be thrown into a pit by sword-wielding captors to await their fate. Though Blackthorne avoids execution himself, a member of his entourage is less fortunate — he’s bound and placed into a cauldron, where he is slowly boiled to death.

    This is Japan in the year 1600 — a time of great unrest after two centuries of civil wars. Here, Blackthorne — based on the real-life navigator William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan — must assimilate to a brutal, foreign reality as a tenuous five-regent government threatens to rupture into warring factions after the passing of the Taikō (retired Imperial regent). With Catholic missionaries providing a further antagonistic presence to the Protestant Blackthorne, his survival may depend on an alliance with Lord Yoshii Toranaga — who has seemingly himself been marked for termination by political rivals.

    In 1600, the world’s power dynamics were very different from today: Protestant England had been forced to defend Elizabeth I’s throne from invasion in 1588, with the Spanish Armada intent on reinstating Catholicism and ending English support for Dutch independence from Spain. The latter country would, by this time, be in a dynastic union with Portugal; the two powerful Iberian states had previously divided the oceanic domains beyond Europe between their vast empires with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. A vanguard of global exploration, Portugal discovered Japan in 1543 — and began to trade Western goods such as matchlock firearms with them while also spreading the Catholic faith via the introduction of Jesuit missionaries. This context serves as the backdrop to Blackthorne’s treacherous voyage in the opening of Shōgun.

Available in: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240305-shogun-tv-hit-fx-violent-japanese-history/. Adapted.

The following text refers to question.

Shōgun: The brutal Japanese history that inspired 2024’s latest TV hit

    There’s a stomach-churning moment in the debut episode of FX/Disney+’s Shōgun that sets the standard for the kind of brutality surely to follow. Having endured starvation, scurvy, and a captain’s suicide aboard a ravaged Dutch trade ship, pilot major John Blackthorne and his surviving crew are shipwrecked off the coast of Anjiro, only to be thrown into a pit by sword-wielding captors to await their fate. Though Blackthorne avoids execution himself, a member of his entourage is less fortunate — he’s bound and placed into a cauldron, where he is slowly boiled to death.

    This is Japan in the year 1600 — a time of great unrest after two centuries of civil wars. Here, Blackthorne — based on the real-life navigator William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan — must assimilate to a brutal, foreign reality as a tenuous five-regent government threatens to rupture into warring factions after the passing of the Taikō (retired Imperial regent). With Catholic missionaries providing a further antagonistic presence to the Protestant Blackthorne, his survival may depend on an alliance with Lord Yoshii Toranaga — who has seemingly himself been marked for termination by political rivals.

    In 1600, the world’s power dynamics were very different from today: Protestant England had been forced to defend Elizabeth I’s throne from invasion in 1588, with the Spanish Armada intent on reinstating Catholicism and ending English support for Dutch independence from Spain. The latter country would, by this time, be in a dynastic union with Portugal; the two powerful Iberian states had previously divided the oceanic domains beyond Europe between their vast empires with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. A vanguard of global exploration, Portugal discovered Japan in 1543 — and began to trade Western goods such as matchlock firearms with them while also spreading the Catholic faith via the introduction of Jesuit missionaries. This context serves as the backdrop to Blackthorne’s treacherous voyage in the opening of Shōgun.

Available in: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240305-shogun-tv-hit-fx-violent-japanese-history/. Adapted.

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder à questão.

Book Review: Torto Arado

Itamar Vieira Júnior's searing novel has captivated Brazil's literary scene.

SÃO PAULO − In 1888, Brazil became the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas. But for many of those who had been considered possessions, emancipation brought little change. More than 130 years later, some in the remote, semi-arid hinterland of Brazil's northeast live under arrangements that seem a holdover from the era of slavery, without access to education, a permanent home, or ownership of the land they have worked for generations.

This region, known as the sertão , is the setting for Torto Arado, the bestselling 2018 novel by geographer-turned-writer Itamar Vieira Júnior. The land is a conspicuous presence on every page of the book, whose title translates to Crooked Plow. Dust covers the characters' bodies and few belongings after a day of hard labor in the fields. Mud is used to build the walls of their temporary huts. The earth fills their mouths, takes their dead children, and is their only means of survival.

The world is already taking note of Vieira Júnior. Torto Arado also won a prize in Italy, and publishing rights have been sold in nine countries. The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts awarded a grant to Montclair State University Professor Johnny Lorenz to translate the novel into English, and a production company has acquired the rights to make a series or film for a streaming service.

Humble origins make Vieira Júnior's international success appear still more impressive. While studying at the Federal University of Bahia, supported by a scholarship for low-income Black students, he worked as a clerk at a grocery store and pharmacy before taking a post as a researcher at the national land reform agency. Vieira Júnior then spent 15 years crisscrossing the vast states of Bahia and Maranhão, spending long periods among rural laborers. These travels provided the material for Torto Arado, written discreetly over several decades. 

FONTANA, Camila. Book Review: Torto Arado. Americas Quarterly, Culture, 19 out. 2021.

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 19 nov. 2023. (Adaptado).

T E X T

The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning

    The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.

    All of these factors have rendered the term “viral” nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is nothing viral?

    “Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world. Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the norm.”

    “Because the concept of virality has been so watered down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of partners and business development at Linktree, a platform that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.

    A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation between viral content and the vast majority of media that users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller, and most sharing was manual (people emailing and messaging links to each other) or via early internet aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

     Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a year, worming its way through the internet as it gained traction. When social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said. Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s content in attempts to force virality.

    Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were.

    Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.

    “The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms race among tech platforms to see which could inflate metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.

    A new class of content creators also has raised the bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to explode, things really started to change in the landscape,” Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of views per video.”

    Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a higher total amount of content online per day, especially members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media through the internet and social platforms, rather than via newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so much more content in a given sitting,” she added.

    This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching 50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1 million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.

Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/