Questões de Inglês - Grammar - Linking words - Conclusion

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Airborne particles cause more than 3m early deaths a year

    Governments are worried over traffic and other local nuisances that create filthy air. But research just published in Nature by Zhang Qiang, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and an international team including environmental economists, physicists and disease experts, suggests the problem has a global dimension, too. Dr Zhang’s analysis estimates that in 2007 — the first year for which complete industrial, epidemiological and trade data were available when the team started work — more than 3m premature deaths around the world were caused by emissions of fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5, because the particles in question are less than 2.5 microns across).

    Of these, the team reckon just under an eighth were associated with pollutants released in a part of the world different from that in which the death occurred, thanks to transport of such particles from place to place by the wind. Almost twice as many (22% of the total) were a consequence of goods and services that were produced in one region (often poor) and then exported for consumption in another (often rich, and with more meticulous environmental standards for its own manufacturers).

    In effect, such rich countries are exporting air pollution, and its associated deaths, as they import goods. As far as China is concerned, that phenomenon is probably abating. Chinese coal consumption has been on the wane since 2013, so premature deaths there from toxic air are now probably dropping. But other industrialising countries, such as India, may yet see an increase.

(www.economist.com, 01.04.2017. Adaptado.)

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    Knowing your genetic code could lengthen your life

    Fifteen years ago this month, the full human genome sequence was published for the first time. Since then technology has markedly speeded up genomic sequencing and reduced the cost. But have those hoped-for medical breakthroughs materialised?
    Sequencing the human genome took 10 years and cost about $30 billion. Now advances in computing power have seen the cost fall to under $500. A British firm has even developed a hand-held reader that can sequence genetic material in minutes. Dr Gordon Sanghera, the firm’s chief executive, talks about creating “the internet of living things – real time connection of live DNA information” using such portable devices. And the applications won’t just be for healthcare, he argues, but for establishing the provenance of food in restaurants, or the presence of dangerous microbes in water supplies. It could also be used for analysing DNA evidence at crime scenes.
    Dr Sanghera believes the device could eventually be used to diagnose common infections at home and so reduce needless trips to the doctor. Within the next 10 years, “everyone will get sequenced at birth”, he says, and we’ll be able to assess whether we have genetic dispositions to particular diseases and take preventative steps accordingly.
    More than 500,000 human genomes have now been sequenced worldwide. But it is how this data will be combined with other data and analysed that is causing excitement. The UK Biobank has enlisted 500,000 volunteers who’ve shared their medical data anonymously in the hope of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. Scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, used Biobank data to highlight the increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes among shift workers¹. The researchers found that people who worked irregular shift patterns were 44% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than people working permanent day shifts. Now, genetic data will be added to the mix.
    We are at the beginning of a revolution in healthcare. But dramatic medical breakthroughs have been tougher to come by than many had hoped at the start of the genomics era. “The completion of the human genome project held out much hope for the better understanding and treatment of diseases. But as is usually the case, we had underestimated the complexity of the relationship of genome to disease and health,” concludes IBM’s Laxmi Parida.
    Yet this is only the beginning – in the genomics era, healthcare is irrevocably changing.

(Adi Gaskell e Matthew Wall. www.bbc.com, 27.04.2018. Adaptado.)

¹ shift workers: those whose work takes place on a schedule outside the traditional 9 am-5 pm day.

Are mobile phones harming your students’ concentration? (Part II)

2. Dependence on instant gratification. When students use their phones, they can receive immediate “rewards” in the form of social media notifications, messages or entertaining videos, which stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain and create a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. This reward-seeking behaviour can become habit-forming, making it difficult for students to engage in tasks that require them to sustain their attention and delay gratification. Indeed, various studies have found that frequent phone users do experience shorter attention spans and greater impulsivity.

Students need prolonged attention and patience constantly in their daily life – be it for reading long texts, actively listening in class or doing their homework after school. As such, lacking these can quickly get in the way of their learning and development.

Fonte: https://www.innerdrive.co.uk/blog/mobile-phones-concentration/ Acessado em 04/11/2024

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Plastic Waste In The Oceans

    In the last few years there has been more and more evidence that plastic pollution in our oceans is becoming a massive problem. Large pieces of plastic which end up in the sea can entangle marine animals or can also suffocate them.

    Tiny pieces of plastic — broken down by the action of water and the sun — cause harm by entering the marine food chain. If the animals eat plastic it will make them feel artificially full so that they do not eat and they starve to death. Furthermore, when fish have eaten plastic it becomes part of their body; if we then eat that fish our food contains plastic — we are eating our own plastic waste.

Infographic

(www.reducereuserecycle.co.uk. Adaptado.)

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What Does It Mean to Tear Down a Statue?

Protesters throwing the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into a harbour.

    Statues of historical figures, including slave traders and Christopher Columbus, are being toppled throughout the U.S. and around the world. This follows years of debate about public display of Confederate symbols. We interviewed the art historian Erin L. Thompson about the topic. Read the excerpt from the interview.

    Q. What are some of the issues that arise when we talk about statues being torn down?

    A. We have as humans been making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have torn them down. So it’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

    Q. What do the recent attacks on statues tell us about the protests themselves?

    A. The current attacks on statues are a sign that what’s in question is not just our future but our past, as a nation, as a society. These attacks show that we need to question the way we understand the world, even the past, in order to get to a better future.

    Q. What’s a statue?

    A. I think a statue is a bid for immortality. It’s a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people. It’s not the statues themselves but the point of view that they represent. And these [the ones being destroyed] are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.

    Also, many Confederate statues are made out of bronze, a metal that you can melt down. The ancient Greeks made their major monuments out of bronze. Hardly any of these survived because as soon as regimes changed, as soon as there was war, it got melted down and made into money or a statue of somebody else.

    We have been in a period of peace and prosperity — not peace for everybody, but the U.S. hasn’t been invaded, we’ve had enough money to maintain statues. So our generation thinks of public art as something that will always be around. But this is a very ahistorical point of view. I wish that what is happening now with statues being torn down didn’t have to happen this way. But there have been peaceful protests against many of these statues which have come to nothing. So if people lose hope in the possibility of a peaceful resolution, they’re going to find other means.

(www.nytimes.com, 11.06.2020. Adaptado.)