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HOW YOU CAN LEARN ENGLISH FROM READING

We all know that reading books is a great way to learn English. What about if you don’t like books, though? Reading a whole book can be tough and timeconsuming, especially if you aren’t interested in reading books in your native language. So, what can we learn from reading something other than a book? Here are some tips:

1- Newspapers use a wide range of vocabulary to describe the world around us. If you feel like you already know all the vocabulary in your textbook or online study course, pick up a newspaper and you’ll soon come across some new words to add to your vocabulary.

2- Most fields of business have English trade journals that people use to keep their professional knowledge up to date. If you are a teacher, get yourself a teaching journal or if you are an architect or designer, subscribe to an interesting design magazine. Reading about your area of work in English will help you learn all specialist English expressions you need to do your job in English.

3- Practise scanning, scanning for specific information in a text is an important skills to master in English. Practise it by reading product specifications in English. Set yourself a task to find out a specific piece of information about a product and see how quickly you can look it up.

4- Reviews are great for finding out which products to buy or which films to see. See if you can understand the gist (general idea) of a review by reading the review and guessing what score the reviewer will give the product out of ten. Check if your guess matches the reviewer’s rating at the bottom of the review.

5- Read instructions to learn how to describe processes. Describing how things work in English is an important skill. It also often comes up as a task in English exams such as IELTS, TOEFL or TOEIC. Next time you buy a new gadget, work out how to use it by reading the instructions in English. You will build your comprehension skills and learn how to describe the process of using something in English 

Adaptado de: ENGLISH LIVE. Disponível em: https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/study-tips/can-learnenglish-reading/. Acesso em 25 mar. 2021.

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It’s the Perfect Time to Discover Avatar: The Last Airbender

Spend your Labor Day weekend watching a 15-year-old Nickelodeon show aimed at children. You won’t regret it.

I’m a TV critic who’s constantly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new television there is to consume; I can’t imagine how the average viewer must feel. Currently, 10 episodes of a new space opera, six episodes of a Civil War drama, a mini series about chess, an adaptation of a beloved novel, and the fourth installment of an anthology series are all vying for my attention—and those are just the ones I’m interested in watching, not the ones that I’ve already written off as being not worth my time.

Yet time and again, I’ve been frustrated by television in 2020. Seasons are bloated and meandering; character arcs are picked up and then abandoned; episodes don’t seem to cohere around any single idea, let alone a good idea; and often, shows are more interested in playing out their premise for as long as possible than they are in telling a story that has a compelling arc and a stunning end. Too many current shows seem to have been greenlit based on someone’s slightly deranged moodboard, or a movie idea spun into a series pitch; not enough are dramatically paced, well-written, coalescing around strong characters and a powerful theme or two. So it was a delight to spend some of the doldrums of August marathoning Avatar: The Last Airbender—a show so good, it puts prestige dramas, expensive streaming series, and wry comedies to shame. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it took the beloved Nickelodeon series’ arrival on Netflix to finally get me to watch its compact, elegant three seasons, which are purportedly intended for children but somehow also managed to make me cry like a baby. Anyway, I’m late to the party—Avatar premiered in 2005—but I’m not alone: After debuting on the platform in May, the series stayed in Netflix’s top 10 for 61 days, topping a previous record held by Ozark. 

For an animated half-hour that lasted just three seasons, this is a lot of meta-text—but if you’ve seen it, it’s not surprising. The series, from creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, introduces viewers to a fantasy world guided by fully non-European tradition, where certain powerful individuals can manipulate one of the four elements. The Avatar is a particularly powerful individual who has the ability to master all four elements; as their title implies, one is reincarnated every generation, holding all of those past lives inside them.

SARAYA, Sonia, 2020. Disponível em: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/avatarthe-last-airbender-netflix. Acesso em 24 mar. 2021. 

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Arecibo Observatory will be demolished

      Arecibo’s days are done. After two support cables failed in recent months, the radio observatory’s 305-meter-wide dish is damaged beyond repair, the National Science Foundation announced on November 19. It will be decommissioned and dismantled.

     The telescope, famous for appearances in movies like GoldenEye and Contact, consists of a wide dish to collect radio waves from space and focus them into detectors housed in a dome suspended above the dish.

     In August, one of the cables that holds up the dome slipped out of a socket and punched a hole in the dish. Then a second cable unexpectedly broke on November 6. If a third cable were to break, it could send the platform holding up the dome swinging, or the whole structure could collapse. 

     The NSF determined that there was no safe way to repair the telescope. 

Adaptado de https://www.sciencenews.org/article/arecibo-telescope-observatory-icon-puerto-rico-science-demolished. 

NASA, US and European Partners Launch Mission to Monitor Global Ocean

    A joint U.S.-European satellite built to monitor global sea levels lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Saturday at 9:17 a.m. PST (12:17 p.m. EST).

    About the size of a small pickup truck, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will extend a nearly 30- year continuous dataset on sea level collected by an ongoing collaboration of U.S. and European satellites while enhancing weather forecasts and providing detailed information on large-scale ocean currents to support ship navigation near coastlines. 

    "The Earth is changing, and this satellite will help deepen our understanding of how," said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA's Earth Science Division. "The changing Earth processes are affecting sea level globally, but the impact on local communities varies widely. International collaboration is critical to both understanding these changes and informing coastal communities around the world." 

    After arriving in orbit, the spacecraft separated from the rocket's second stage and unfolded its twin sets of solar arrays. Ground controllers successfully acquired the satellite's signal, and initial telemetry reports showed the spacecraft in good health. Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will now undergo a series of exhaustive checks and calibrations before it starts collecting science data in a few months' time.

Fonte: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-us-and-european-partners-launch-mission-to-monitor-global-ocean>acesso 16 de dezembro de 2020.

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       Plans for international trips in 2020 were brought to an abrupt halt by the Covid-19 pandemic. Around the world, once-crowded sights lay dormant.

     The statistics speak for themselves. On 13 October, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that international traffic “has all but disappeared”, with airlines carrying only about 10% of normal levels.

    By IATA’s estimate, Covid-caused disruptions put more than 41 million jobs at risk across the travel and tourism sector.

   In the absence of travellers, tourism boards, hotels and destinations have turned to virtual reality (VR) — a technology still in its relative infancy — to keep would-be visitors interested and prepare for the long road to recovery.

    What began for many as a temporary stop-gap measure may now be a long-term tool. IATA predicts that travel will not resume to pre-pandemic levels until 2024.

   Faced with a new reality of diminished tourism, many believe that Covid-19 might be the watershed moment for VR that changes perceptions from a clever and occasional marketing trick to a permanent fixture of tourism marketing.  

Internet: <www.bbc.com> (adapted).