Questões de Concurso Sobre inglês

Infants and Toddlers Eat Too Much Sugar, Researchers Say

1 - Using C.D.C. data, researchers found that 98 percent of toddlers and 60 percent of infants consumed added sugar in sweetened drinks, baked goods and snacks. 

2 - Nearly all American toddlers about two-thirds of infants onsume added sugar, despite nutritionists’ recommendations that children avoid the sweetener, according to a government study released this week.

3 - Researchers, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that from 2011 to 2016, 98 percent of toddlers ages 12 to 23 months consumed added sugar in fruit drinks, baked goods, candy and ready-to-eat cereals. Black toddlers ate the most added sugar — about eight teaspoons a day — while toddlers of Asian descent consumed the least, about 3.7 teaspoons a day.

4 - “The most important thing to take away is that added sugars are everywhere,” said the study’s lead investigator, Kirsten Herrick, who now works at the National Cancer Institute’s cancer control and population sciences division. “What is surprising is how added sugar quickly exceeds the recommended daily amounts.”

5 - The researchers also found that about 60 percent of infants up to 11 months old consumed added sugar in yogurt, baby snacks and flavored milk, among other foods — about one teaspoon of sugar per day. The study size was too small to make scientific conclusions about race, Dr. Herrick said. The findings were published on Thursday in The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

6 - Added sugars include any sweetener, including cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, that does not occur naturally in food. The American Heart Association advises that toddlers and infants 

7 - In 2016, the American Cancer Society released dietary guidelines that said adults should limit added sugar to 10 percent of their daily calories. In particular, it suggested people reduce the number of sugar-sweetened drinks, including fruit and sports drinks, they consume. Sugar is associated not only with weight gain, but also with many types of cancer, the society said.

8 - Dr. Herrick said the consumption of sugar in teenagers and older children has been linked to cavities, asthma, obesity and high blood pressure. Amid news of the alarming amount of sugar consumption, though, she said researchers also observed that sugar consumption in infants was declining over all.

9 - Dr. Herrick warned that exposing children to sugary foods when they are young could impact taste preferences when they are older.

10 - “There is no reason to provide sugar-sweetened beverages” to toddlers and infants, she said. “They need nutrient-dense foods.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/science/sugar-toddlers-infants.html

TEXT 5:

Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set

Researchers find evidence of rising plastic pollution in an accidental source: log books for planktonmonitoring instruments. Matthew Warren 

Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades — by analysing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels. 

Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) — which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean — show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades.

This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, longterm data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I’m excited that this has been finally done,” he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications. 

 Although the findings are unsurprising, long-term data on ocean plastics had been scant: previous studies looked mainly at the ingestion of plastic by sea creatures over shorter timescales, the researchers say.

Fishing for data

CPRs are torpedo-like devices that have been used since 1931 to survey plankton populations, by filtering the organisms from the water using bands of silk. Today, volunteer ships such as ferries and container ships tow a fleet of CPRs around the world’s oceans. 

(…)Each time a ship tows a CPR, the crew fills in a log book and notes any problems with the device. So Ostle and her colleagues looked through all tow logs from the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, to determine whether plastic entanglements have become more common.

Evidence analysis

(…)Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn’t reveal much about the quantity of microplastics — fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long — in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear.

Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. “As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease,” he says.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01252-0 (adapted).

Access: April 20th, 2019 

INSTRUCTION: Read the cartoon and answer to the question.

Read this text and answer to the question

Inside the world's quietest room

Read the Mother Teresa’s “Anyway Poem” and answer.

                          People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;

                                                     Forgive them anyway.

                          If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior

                                                                  motives;

                                                            Be kind anyway.

                         If you are successful, you will win some false friends and 

                                                        some true enemies;

                                                         Succeed anyway.

                             If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

                                                Be honest and frank anyway.

                         What you spend years building, someone could destroy

                                                            overnight;

                                                         Build anyway.

                            If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

                                                    Be happy anyway.

                           The good you do today people will often forget tomorrow;

                                                     Do good anyway.

                              Give the world the best you have, and it may never be

                                                            enough;

                                     Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

                         You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;

                                   It was never between you and them anyway.

[Reportedly inscribed on the wall of Mother Teresa’s children’s home in Calcutta, and attributed to her. However, an article in the New York Times has since reported (March 8, 2002)] 

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggest that brainwave-sensing headsets, also known as EEG or electroencephalograph headsets, need better security after a study reveals hackers could guess a user’s passwords by monitoring their brainwaves.

(Disponível: <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170701081756.htm> )

                     Computer that reads body language

      Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have enabled a computer to understand body poses and movements of multiple people from video in real time – including, for the first time, the pose of each individual’s hands and fingers.

      Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed methods to detect the body pose, including facial expressions and hand positions, of multiple individuals. This enables computers to not only identify parts of the body, but to understand how they are moving and positioned.

      This new method was developed with the help of the Panoptic Studio, a two-story dome embedded with 500 video cameras. The insights gained from experiments in that facility now make it possible to detect the pose of a group of people using a single camera and a laptop computer.

      Yaser Sheikh, associate professor of robotics, said these methods for tracking 2-D human form and motion open up new ways for people and machines to interact with each other, and for people to use machines to better understand the world around them. The ability to recognize hand poses, for instance, will make it possible for people to interact with computers in new and more natural ways, such as communicating with computers simply by pointing at things.

      Detecting the nuances of nonverbal communication between individuals will allow robots to serve in social spaces, allowing robots to perceive what people around them are doing, what moods they are in and whether they can be interrupted. A self-driving car could get an early warning that a pedestrian is about to step into the street by monitoring body language. In sports analytics, real-time pose detection will make it possible for computers not only to track the position of each player on the field of play, as is now the case, but to also know what players are doing with their arms, legs and heads at each point in time. The methods can be used for live events or applied to existing videos.

      “The Panoptic Studio supercharges our research”, Sheikh said. It now is being used to improve body, face and hand detectors by jointly training them. Also, as work progresses to move from the 2-D models of humans to 3-D models, the facility’s ability to automatically generate annotated images will be crucial.

      When the Panoptic Studio was built a decade ago with support from the National Science Foundation, it was not clear what impact it would have, Sheikh said.

      “Now, we’re able to break through a number of technical barriers primarily as a result of a grant 10 years ago”, he added. “We’re sharing the code, but we’re also sharing all the data captured in the Panoptic Studio”.

(Disponível: <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170706143158.htm> )