Questões de Interpretação de texto em inglês da Famema

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A gender stereotype is a generalized view or preconception about attributes or characteristics, or the roles that are or ought to be possessed by, or performed by, women and men. A gender stereotype is harmful when it limits women’s and men’s capacity to develop their personal abilities, pursue their professional careers and/or make choices about their lives.

Whether clearly hostile (such as “women are irrational”) or seemingly benign (“women are nurturing”), harmful stereotypes perpetuate inequalities. For example, the traditional view of women as care givers means that child care responsibilities often fall exclusively on women.

Further, gender stereotypes compounded and intersecting with other stereotypes have a disproportionate negative impact on certain groups of women, such as women from minority or indigenous groups, women with disabilities or with lower economic status, migrant women etc.

(https://ohchr.org. Adaptado.)

No contexto em que se insere, o trecho sublinhado (em negrito) que expressa ideia de consequência é:

Read the comic strip by Jim Davis.

(www.gocomics.com)

The sentence in the third panel expresses the idea of

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Fake news can distort people’s beliefs even after being debunked. A study recently published in the journal Intelligence suggests that some people may have an especially difficult time rejecting misinformation. Asked to rate a fictitious person on a range of character traits, people who scored low on a test of cognitive ability continued to be influenced by damaging information about the person even after they were explicitly told the information was false. The study is significant because it identifies what may be a major risk factor for vulnerability to fake news.

One possible explanation for this finding is based on the theory that a person’s cognitive ability reflects how well they can regulate the contents of working memory – their “mental workspace” for processing information. First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand, or information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills – strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking – that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.

(www.scientificamerican.com, 06.02.2018. Adaptado.)

O tema central do texto é

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Drinking coffee could help you live longer

Coffee not only helps you feel full of beans, it might add years to your life as well, two major studies have shown. Scientists in Europe and the US have uncovered the clearest evidence yet that drinking coffee reduces the risk of death.

One study of more than half a million people from 10 European countries found that men who downed at least three cups of coffee a day were 18% less likely to die from any cause than non-coffee drinkers. Women drinking the same amount benefited less, but still experienced an 8% reduction in mortality over the period measured.

Similar results were reported by American scientists who conducted a separate investigation, recruiting 185 855 participants from different ethnic backgrounds. Irrespective of ethnicity, people who drank two to three cups of coffee daily had an 18% reduced risk of death.

Each of the studies, both published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, showed no advantage from drinking either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. Experts believe the antioxidant plant compounds in coffee rather than caffeine are responsible for the life-extending effect. Previous research has suggested that drinking coffee can reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, and some cancers.

Dr Marc Gunter, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, who led the European study with colleagues from Imperial College London, said: “We found that higher coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death from any cause and specifically for circulatory diseases and digestive diseases. Importantly, these results were similar across all of the 10 European countries, with variable coffee drinking habits and customs. Our study also offers important insights into the possible mechanisms for the beneficial health effects of coffee.”

(www.huffingtonpost.co.uk, 11.07.2017. Adaptado.)

De acordo com o texto,

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Read books, live longer?

Nicholas Bakalar August 3, 2016

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

Reading books is tied to a longer life, according to a new report. Researchers used data on 3,635 people over 50 participating in a larger health study who had answered questions about reading. The scientists divided the sample into three groups: those who read no books, those who read books up to three and a half hours a week, and those who read books more than three and a half hours.

The study, in Social Science & Medicine, found that book readers tended to be female, college-educated and in higher income groups. So, researchers controlled for those factors as well as age, race, self-reported health, depression, employment and marital status.

Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all.

They found a similar association among those who read newspapers and periodicals, but it was weaker.

(http://well.blogs.nytimes.com. Adaptado.)

Segundo o texto, os pesquisadores

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Scientists grow primitive human kidneys in a dish

October 07, 2015

Image of a mini-kidney formed in a dish from human induced pluripotent stem cells. (Minoru Takasato/Nature)

For the first time, primitive human kidneys have been created in a laboratory dish, by using stem cells. Although the kidneys cannot perform the functions of a fully formed adult kidney, the researchers hope the achievement will someday lead to new ways to treat people suffering from kidney failure. “It’s really exciting,” says Melissa Little, who heads the Kidney Research Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia. She led the research, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “I think this is a really big advance.”

Kidneys are essential for life. They perform a host of crucial bodily functions, including filtering toxins from the blood and regulating blood pressure and bone density. But kidneys can fail for a variety of reasons, including poisonings, infections and other diseases.

“The problem is that if something goes wrong with your kidneys, there are only two options and these have been the same for 50 years: You either have a transplant or go onto dialysis,” Little says. “So we really need alternative options.” To find alternatives, Little and others have been trying for years to grow kidneys in the lab using cells known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. “Almost 10 years ago now it was shown that you could take any cell from anybody – like you or me – and actually convince it to go back into the state that’s essentially like the fertilized egg, so it is able to turn into any tissue type,” Little says.

While scientists have been able to use iPS cells to create many types of human cells, using them to create a kidney has proved difficult. The problem has been finding just the right combination of chemical signals to trigger iPS cells into making the various tissues in a kidney. “It’s like a recipe,” Little says. “We put different concentrations and types of growth factors in a certain order into the dish. And then when it gets to a certain size we take all the cells and make it into a ball.” After that, the cells talk to each other, she says. One type of cell will signal to its neighbor, and its neighbor will signal back, and that actually makes them form the appropriate shape.

(www.npr.org. Adaptado.)

Segundo o texto, a pesquisa liderada por Melissa Little