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    If you’re a chocoholic you may have noticed that your habit has lately become more expensive. The price of cocoa began creeping up in the second half of 2022. Since then it has doubled, reaching an all-time high in January 2024. That steep rise spells trouble for the chocolate business and sweet-toothed consumers alike.

    Climate patterns are partly to blame for rising costs. Cocoa is mostly produced by small farmers in West Africa. Ghana and Ivory Coast grow about 60% of the world’s crop. Last season, in 2023, the El Niño weather pattern led to unseasonably high temperatures and rainfall that ravaged crops. Total rainfall in Ivory Coast’s cocoa-growing areas in 2023 was the highest in 20 years, according to Gro Intelligence, a data firm.

    This year El Niño has brought severe drought to the cocoa farms, reducing production further. ING, a bank, estimates that this year the gap between global production and consumption will be at its widest since at least 2014. Extreme weather patterns have hit other commodities, too. Droughts in Thailand and India are affecting rice plantations. Torrential rain in Brazil, the world’s biggest sugar exporter, has affected its exports. Besides, other price pressures are specific to the cocoa industry. Swollen-shoot virus and black-pod disease — killers of cocoa trees — spread across Ghana and Ivory Coast during heavy rainfall last year. Tropical Research Services, a research company, estimates that by the end of 2023 the swollen-shoot virus had infected around 20% of Ivory Coast’s cocoa trees.

(www.economist.com, 28.02.2024. Adaptado.)

Leia a tirinha de Brian Crane para responder à questão abaixo.

(Brian Crane. Still Pickled After All These Years, 2004.)

Leia o texto e examine o gráfico para responder á questão abaixo.

    Most don’t work anymore, but Americans age 70 and older have seen their share of collective wealth surge during the pandemic. As a group, they have accumulated more than $14 trillion in additional net worth since the end 2019, based on Federal Reserve data. Their share of the country’s wealth has jumped to a record 30%, even though they account for 11% of the population.

    The aging population helps explain some of the gains: there are about 2.3 million more people over 70 in the country than in 2019. But one major driver was the surge in home values and stocks during the pandemic, which benefited older generations most likely to own a house — or two — and hold equities or mutual funds.

    Although people who are over 70 are typically retired, a rising portion of that age group is still working. The share of adults age 65 and more in the labor force reached a historic low of 10% in the mid-1980s but has since almost doubled, even after many retired early at the onset of the covid-19 health crisis.

    Older Americans also have been the beneficiaries of good timing with the stock market, despite recessions along the way. Since 2019, those age 70 and older have collectively gained about $5 trillion in equity gains. Close to 38% of the nation’s corporate equities and mutual fund shares were held by people in that age group, the highest share on record in data going back to 1989.

(Alex Tanzi. www.bnnbloomberg.ca, 2023. Adaptado.)

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    When Tinder (a mobile dating app) was launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed1 an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun.

    Soon Tinder and its rivals had transformed dating. A report found that 30% of American adults had used an online dating service, including more than half of those aged between 18 and 29. One in five couples of that age had met through such a service. Usage surged during the pandemic, as lonely locked- -down singles searched for partners. The market capitalisation of Bumble, a rival to Tinder, surged to $13 billion on its first day of trading² in February 2021. Later that year the value of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and scores of other dating services, reached nearly $50 billion.

    Today roughly 350 million people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250 million in 2018, according to a research firm. In June 2024 Tokyo’s government even said it would launch a matchmaking app of its own to pair up singles in the city. Yet lately online dating has lost its spark. The apps were downloaded 237 million times globally in 2023, down from 287 million in 2020. According to a research firm, the number of people who use them at least once a month has dwindled from 154 million in 2021 to 137 million in the second quarter of 2024.

(www.economist.com, 08.08.2024. Adaptado.)

1 to shed: to get rid of something that is no longer wanted.
2 trading: the activity of buying and selling things.

As questão está relacionada ao texto abaixo.

    There are as many ways of being blind as there

are of being tall, or sick, or hot. But the popular 
view has always conceived …….. blindness as a

totality. The blind bards wandering the

[5] countrysides of ancient Japan, China, or Europe, 
the blind housed in asylums in the Middle Ages, 
all the pupils in all the schools for the blind from 
the Enlightenment onward, blind beggars and

lawyers, war veterans and toddlers - in the eyes

[10] of history, as well as those of most of their 
contemporaries, they all saw nothing. Modern 
dictionaries still subscribe to this sense: 
blindness is the antonym of vision, and connotes 
a destitution of sight. What else could it mean?

[15]    Despite the poetic impulse to equate blindness

…….. darkness, it's rarely experienced as a black

veil draped over the world. Only around 15 
percent of blind people have no light perception 
whatsoever. Most see something, even if it isn't 
[20] very useful, by sighted standards: a blurry view 
of their periphery, with nothing in the middle, or 
the inverse - the world seen through a 

buttonhole. For some, scenes come through in a 
dim haze; for others, light produces a shower of 
[25] excruciatingly bright needles. Even those with no 
light perception at all have little use for the 
popular image of blindness as darkness: the 
brain cut off from visual stimulus can still 

produce washes of brilliant color and shape. One 
[30] blind man, whose optic nerve - the connection 
between the eyes and the brain - had been 
severed, described seeing a continuously 
swirling (and distracting) "visual tinnitus." The 
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, decades 
[35] …….. his blindness, still saw color, which

sometimes disturbed him: "I, who was 
accustomed to sleeping in total darkness," he 
said, “was bothered for a long time at having to 
sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or 
[40] bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world 
of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness”.

    The arrival or encroachment of blindness gives

rise to a similarly dazzling range of experiences, 
an efflorescence of blind varietals. There are 
[45] those born blind, with no visual memories, 
whose brains – including the visual cortices – 
develop using four (or fewer) senses to construct 
their view of the world. Those who become blind 
in early childhood often retain visual memories 
[50] that can contribute to an intuitive understanding 
of visual concepts. The late-blinded may have 
the most cognitive work to do, forced to relearn 
basic skills like orientation and information – 
gathering through new senses, long after their 

[55] brains' developmental plasticity has hardened. 
Some late-blinded adults consciously struggle to 
preserve their storehouses of mental images, 
like art conservators touching up old and fading 
masterpieces. 

[60]    People are blinded by their spouses or strangers,

by acts of war or sports injuries, by industrial

accidents and bad decisions, malnutrition and

infection, genetic inheritances and spontaneous

mutations. It's disingenuous to argue that

[65] blindness doesn't have a transformative impact

...….. a person's life, but in every case, blindness

is only part of the story. The life of a blind person

is never fully (or even predominantly) defined by

their blindness».

Extraído de: LELAND, A. The Country of the Blind: A memoir at the end of sight. New York: Penguin, 2023.