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

    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.

WHAT'S YOUR WATER-FOOTPRINT?

[01] How Much water do you think is in an espresso? According to Professor Tony Allan a typical espresso contains 140 liters of water! In his book Virtual water; He says that we are not aware of 90% of the water we use, as it is 'hidden' water used in the production of the food and goods we buy. So, it takes 140 liters to grow, produce, package, and ship

[05] the beans you use to make your morning espresso. Professor Allan calls this water 'virtual water'. Since the appearance of this book, many people are taking these ideas very seriously. Water consumption varies greatly by country. In wealthy countries, people use about 150 liters a day for washing and drinking. However, if you include the 'virtual water' in their food and clothes, the figure jumps to 5,000 liters per day. A huge amount of

[10] water is used in beef production. Due to the growth of cities and rising populations, water is becoming a more valuable resource. In the next few decades, water will become a major issue for the world. Part of the solution may come thorough improvements in agricultural performance, thorough the use of better fertilizers, pesticides, etc. In recent years, agricultural production in Europe has increased from 3 tons of food per hectare to

[15] 10 tons. But we also need to improve the management of our water supply. this can happen through more waste water recycling (e.g. reusing water from our bath) or the development of better methods of desalination (= the removal of salt from water) - we can then use more sea water in agriculture. In the meantime, what can the individual do? Well, have you thought about taking a shower instead of a bath, fixing your leaky taps, or

[20] eating hamburgers less often? This action may seem like a drop in the ocean, but every drop helps!

Beef 15,500 liters per kg/Pork 4,800 liters per kg/Cheese 5,000 liters per kg/Milk 1,000 liters per kg/Egg 200 liters per kg/Rice 3,400 liters per kg

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

        Latin America in 2024

Despite mediocre growth, political risk is declining and cautious optimism is increasingly warranted.

SÃO PAULO — Despite a challenging macroeconomic and geopolitical scenario, 2023 was not a bad year for Latin America. Throughout the past twelve months, a cautiously optimistic outlook among analysts has become increasingly common. Economic growth in 2023 is expected to end up at 2.2 % — somewhat better than the 1.7 % initially projected, but still below the global average of 3.2 %. Most analysts expect growth to decline slightly to 1.9 % this year, too little to decisively overcome the deep-seated public discontent that has been so prevalent across Latin America in recent years.

https://tinyurl.com/2zpnfdct Acesso em: 16.01.2024. Adaptado.

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    France wants to put a lid on the tourist crowds that flood historic landmarks and natural treasures each year, though officials have said it would not be easy. Tourism Minister Olivia Gregoire unveiled a plan to regulate visitor flows at the most popular sites and lay out a strategy against overtourism. She said France, the world’s biggest tourist destination, particularly needed to better manage the peak-season influxes that threatened “the environment, the quality of life for locals, and the experiences for its visitors”. The issue is urgent for prime destinations worldwide as international travel surges after covid-19 lockdowns. Many of the most revered French sites, such as the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in Normandy, say they are overwhelmed by the number of visitors.

    On the famed Channel beach of Etretat, which saw a tourism surge thanks to the plot of the Netflix detective series “Lupin”, the 1,200 residents see up to 10,000 tourists a day in the high season. “This massive influx ends up eroding the cliffs and endangers the beach cliffs,” co-head of the Etretat Tomorrow residents’ association Shai Mallet said. She also laments the lack of local economic benefits, with visitors staying just a few hours, maybe grabbing an ice cream but not constantly frequenting restaurants or hotels.

    The government’s announcement comes as Paris, which is dealing with a housing shortage in part because homeowners prefer short-term rentals to tourists, said last week it expects 37 million tourists this year, just short of the pre-pandemic level of 38.5 million in 2019. Limits are already being set, with officials limiting day visits to the gorgeous Brittany island of Brehat at 4,700 during the peak summer months.

(www.euronews.com, 20.06.2023. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    Of the 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastic produced up to the end of 2015, 6,300 million tonnes have been discarded. Most of that plastic waste is still with us, buried in landfills or polluting the environment. But what if we could wave a magic wand and remove all plastics from our lives? For the sake of the planet, it would be a tempting prospect — but we’d quickly find out just how far plastic has seeped into every aspect of our existence. Is life as we know it even possible without plastic?

    Our food system would quickly collapse. We use packaging to protect food from damage in transit and preserve it long enough to reach supermarket shelves, but also for communication and marketing. “I cannot imagine how [plastic] would be replaced completely in our system,” says Eleni Iacovidou, a lecturer in environmental management at Brunel University London.

    Swapping out plastic packaging would produce several environmental side-effects. While glass has some advantages over plastic, such as being endlessly recyclable, a one litre glass bottle can weigh as much as 800g compared to a 40g plastic one. This results in glass bottles having a higher overall environmental impact compared to plastic containers for milk or fruit juice, for example. When those heavier bottles and jars need to be transported over long distances, carbon emissions grow even more.

    In some ways, though, changing food packaging would be the easy part. You might buy milk in a glass bottle, but plastic tubing is used in the dairy industry to get that milk from cow to bottle. Even if you buy vegetables loose, sheets of plastic protective cover may have helped the farmer who grew them save water. Without plastic, industrial agriculture as we know it would be impossible. Instead, we’d need shorter food chains — think farm shops and community-supported agriculture. But with over half of the global population now living in cities, this would require huge changes in where and how we grow food. It wouldn’t be an impossible task, says Iacovidou, but “we have to devote the time to do it”.

(Kelly Oakes. www.bbc.com, 07.06.2022. Adaptado.)