Transcript FUVEST

FUVEST
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• ADDING UP THE UNDER-SKILLED
•
For years U.S. employers have been
grousing(lamentaram) that more and more
aspiring workers lack the know-how to get the
most basic jobs done. Last week such complaints
received alarming confirmation. Adult Literacy in
America, a 150-page survey conducted by the
Educational Testing Service (ETS), reported that
roughly 90 million Americans over age 16-almost
half that category's total population-are, as far as
most workplaces are concerned, basically unfit(2)
for employment.
• In December 1895 the German physicist Wilhelm
Conrad Roentgen demonstrated the first X-ray
pictures, among them that of the left hand of Mrs.
Roentgen. Within a few weeks the news of the
discovery spread throughout the world, and the
penetrating properties of the rays were soon
exploited for medical diagnosis without immediate
realization of possible deleterious effects. The first
reports of X-ray injury to various human tissues
and to vision came in 1896. In that same year
Elihu Thomson, the physicist, deliberately,
exposed one of his fingers to X-rays and provided
accurate scientific observations on the
development of roentgen-ray burns.
•
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
• Women in ancient Pompeii were not all like the
classical beauties depicted on the city's famous
frescoes(*). A substantial minority of those who
died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79
were obese, a bit on the hairy side and would have
suffered from headaches and a form of diabetes,
according to Estelle Lazer, an archaeologist and
physical anthropologist at the University of
Sidney. She says about 10 per cent of the city's
women would have suffered from these systems
because they had a minor hormonal disorder
called hyperostosis frontalis interna(HFI).
•
("New Scientist")
• (*) frescoes - afrescos (modalidade de pintura
mural)
• A priest Known by his Resistance code name
Abbé Pierre awakened the conscience of France in
1954 when he seized the microphone of Radio
Luxembourg and told of a women who had frozen
to death in a Paris street clutching a notice of
eviction(*). His appeal for help - for blankets,
stoves, tents - altered French thinking about the
homeless. Through continued outspokenness and
charitable work he influenced subsequent public
policy, and today polls show Abbé Pierre, founder
of the international charity Companions of
Emmaus, to be the nation's most admired person.
•
(Time,)
•
(*) eviction - despejo
• Avoid looking like in American when in another country,
say Roger Axtell and John Healy in their "Do's and Taboos
of Preparing for Your Trip Abroad". This is a difficult
piece of advice to follow. Mr. A and Mr. H offer what they
consider helpful tips: don't wear baseball caps or sweat
shirts with campus badges, be polite and avoid loud
conversations in public. The trouble is, foreigners mostly
tend to look like foreigners. There is something about
them. The more you try to blend is with the country the
odder you look. Lots of eccentric English have tried this
game without success. Lawrence of Arabia liked to dress
up as a sheikh and Lord Byron as a Greek, and were
seemingly impervious to the sniggers(*) they aroused
among the locals. (The Economist,)(*) snigger - riso
contido
• Ovambo families in northern Namibia
traditionally build a house for each child,
using wooden poles placed close together to
build the circular walls. But now that the
region is running short of trees enterprising
people in the area are turning to a more
readily available building material: the
empty beer bottles that litter the roadsides
and are available cheap from local shops.
•
"New Scientist”
• HE'S ALL EARS
• A pocket-size monkey with a koala-like face, a
hint of stripes like a zebra and tufted ears is the
latest species to be discovered in the world's
largest rain forest. Named after a nearby Brazilian
river, the Maués marmoset is the third new
monkey to be found in the rain forest during the
past two years. Such revelations underscore the
Amazon basin's biological richness (it is home to
more than a quarter of the world's known primate
species) and its continuing aura of mystery.
•
Time
• Cholera attacks the intestines, causing nausea and severe
diarrhea that has been likened to a hemorrhage. It can kill
within hours. The epidemic has appeared and reappeared
across the globe in many forms since at least the ninth
century. But the last time it struck in South America was
1895. The Pan-American Health Organization warns that
the new strain, known as El Tor, is likely to kill 40.000
Latin Americans and infect another 6 million by 1995.
• El Tor's path is impossible to predict. Borne by human
travelers and cargoes of raw fish and produce, cholera can
show up as a surprise visitor almost anywhere. Last week
four people fell ill with cholera in New Jersey - victims of
contaminated shellfish from Peru. But in general,
developed countries are susceptible only to isolated
outbreaks. It is the hot, humid, sewerless slums of Latin
America that are now most vulnerable to epidemic.
•
Newsweek -
• FOND AND FAITHFUL
• Porcupines, like humans, are among the few
species that couple for life, and regular sex may be
the key to their faithfulness. Biologists at Tel Aviv
University have documented that porcupine pairs,
both in captivity and the wild have frequent sex
during the night, even when the female can't
conceive. The researchers conclude that "frequent
sociosexual behavior" reinforces lifelong bonding.
Besides, given a porcupine's armor of sharp
spines, fighting over new females may not be
worth the damage.
•
(New Scientist)
• An earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration-the disintegration
not only of architecture and pavements and lives but also of the entire
idea of order of process and human control. "What can one believe
quite safe" asked Seneca, "if the world itself is shaken and its most
solid parts totter to their fall... and the earth lose its chief characteristic
stability?"
• In March 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the Long Beach campus of
the University of California. He and his host from the department of
geology walked through the campus, intently discussing the motions of
earthquakes. Suddenly they looked up in puzzlement to see people
running out of campus buildings. Einstein and the other scientist had
been so busy discussing seismology that they did not notice the
earthquake occurring under their feet.
•
• Spiders on marijuana are so laid back, they weave
just so much of their webs and then... well it just
doesn't seem to matter any more. On the soporific
drug chloral hydrate, they drop off before they
even get started.
• A spider's skill at spinning its web is so obviously
affected by the ups and downs of different drugs
that scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight
Center in Alabama think spiders could replace
other animals in testing the toxicity of chemicals.
• London was more prepared for the outbreak of the second
world war than the central government let on. After all if
you were seeking peace through diplomacy, it was unwise
to tell the citizenry how far you feared the worst.
• For London, the worst was aerial bombing on a scale not
previously known. If not quite the greatest city in the
world in 1939, London was certainly among the most
expansive. Over 8 million people - about one fifth of the
British population - lived there, concentrated in an area of
some 750 square miles. It was an inviting target for
anything that the Germans could drop on it, and the
government knew it.
•
• Across the developing world, images of wild-eyed children and
haggard teenagers firing assault rifles or shouldering grenade launchers
have become as commonplace as the smell of cordite. Look closely at
the ethnic armies of Central Asia, examine the rebel militias in the
African bush, and you'll find children. You'll find them in the ranks, on
the barricades and, with heart-rending frequency, in hospital beds and
in hastily dug battlefield graves. International conventions are
supposed to bar anyone under the age of 15 from serving in combat.
But that hasn't stopped either governments or rebels in Africa, Asia
and Latin America from routinely rounding up children for military
duty.... Call them what you will. Boy soldiers, child warriors, kid
militiamen.
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wild-eyed = appearing or being furious, radical, visionary
haggard = intractable, violent, suffering, anxious
cordite = a kind of explosive
heart-rending = heart-breaking
• As old barriers break down, voyagers in the next
century will enjoy more exotic locales, more
exotic customs - and perhaps more exotic diseases.
This year's Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire raises an
issue as chilling now as it was in 1347, when
traders sailing from the Black Sea port of Caffa to
Messina, Sicily, brought back plague, which killed
perhaps one-third of Europe's population. As it
happens, plague also cropped up in 1994, in India.