TEXT III

Important reasons for teaching kindness in schools

Most people have heard the phrase random acts of kindness, which refers to a selfless act of giving

resulting in the happiness of another person. Terms like this are increasing in popularity around the

world, as more people identify a deficiency in their lives that can only be fulfilled by altruism.

It seems we just can't get enough of those addictive feel good emotions and with good reason.

5 Scientific studies have shown that kindness has a great number of physical and emotional benefits,

and that children require a healthy dose of the warm and fuzzies in order to flourish as health, happy,

well-rounded individuals.

Patty O'Grady, PhD, is an expert in the area of neuroscience, emotional learning, and positive

psychology with special attention to the educational arena. She believes that kindness changes the brain

10 by the experience of kindness. Children and adolescents do not learn kindness by only thinking about it and

talking about it. Kindness is best learned by feeling it so that they can reproduce it. Kindness is an emotion that

students feel and empathy is a strength that they share.

A great number of benefits have been reported to support the theory of teaching kindness in schools:

1. Happy Children

15 Science explains that the good feelings we experience when being kind are produced by endorphins

that activate areas of the brain that are associated with pleasure, social connection and trust, and it's

proven that these feelings of joyfulness are contagious, encouraging more kind behaviour by the giver

and recipient.

2. Increased Peer Acceptance

20 Research on the subject has determined that kindness increases our ability to form meaningful

connections with others. Studies show that kind, happy children enjoy greater peer acceptance

because they are well-liked and that better than average mental health is reported in classrooms that

practice more inclusive behaviour due to an even distribution of popularity.

3. Improved Health and Less Stress

25 It's widely documented that being kind can trigger a release of the hormone oxytocin which has a

number of physical and mental health benefits as it can significantly increase a person's level of

happiness and reduce stress. More recently though, it's been found it plays a significant role in the

cardiovascular system, helping protect the heart by lowering blood pressure and reducing free

radicals and inflammation, which incidentally speed up the aging process.

30 4. Greater Sense of Belonging and Improved Self Esteem

Studies show that people experience a 'helpers high' when they do a good deed, a rush of endorphins

that creates a lasting sense of pride, wellbeing and an enriched sense of belonging. Even small acts of

kindness are reported to heighten our sense of wellbeing, increase energy and give a wonderful

feeling of optimism and self worth.

35 5. Increased Feelings of Gratitude

When children are part of projects that help others less fortunate than themselves, it provides them

with a real sense of perspective and helps them appreciate the good things in their own lives.

6. Better Concentration and Improved Results

As it increases serotonin, which plays an important part in learning, memory, mood, sleep, health and

40 digestion, kindness is a key ingredient that helps children feel good. Having a positive outlook allows

them greater attentions spans and enables more creative thinking to produce better results at school.

7. Less Bullying

Two Penn State Harrisburg faculty researchers, Shanetia Clark and Barbara Marinak say, unlike

previous generations, today's adolescents are victimizing each other at alarming rates. They argue adolescent

45 bullying and youth violence can be confronted through in-school programs that integrate kindness the

antithesis of victimization.

Many traditional anti-bullying programs focus on the negative actions that cause children anxiety and

often with little impact. Teaching kindness and compassion in schools, not only fosters the positive

behaviour that creates warm and inclusive school environments, but helps children feel that they

50 belong. It's documented that the effects of bullying can be significantly reduced by integrating

kindness based programs in schools.

8. Reduced Depression

Dr. Wayne Dyer, internationally renowned author and speaker, says research has discovered that an

act of kindness increases levels of serotonin (a natural chemical responsible for improving mood) in

55 the brain. It's also found that serotonin levels are increased in both the giver and receiver of an act of

kindness, as well as anyone who witnesses that kindness, making it a wonderful natural

antidepressant.

Maurice Elias, a professor at Rutgers University Psychology Department says that as a citizen,

grandparent, father, and professional, it is clear to me that the mission of schools must include teaching kindness.

60 Without it, communities, families, schools, and classrooms become places of incivility where lasting learning is

unlikely to take place.

We need to be prepared to teach kindness, because it can be delayed due to maltreatment early in life. It can be

smothered under the weight of poverty, and it can be derailed by victimization later in life. Yet despite these and

other travails, the receipt of kindness and the ability to show kindness through service are both growth enhancing

65 and soul cleansing.

Kindness can be taught, and it is a defining aspect of civilized human life. It belongs in every home, school,

neighborhood, and society.

It's become quite clear that modern education must encompass more than just academics, that in order

for children to develop into happy, confident, well-rounded individuals, matters of the heart must be

70 taken seriously and nurtured as a matter of priority.

Disponível em: <http://edarticle.com/8-important-reasons-for-teaching-kindness-in-schools/>. Acesso em: 15 set. 2016.

TEXT

August 24, 2016 / By Digestive Health Team

Are You Pooping All Wrong?

5 tips to keep your bowels healthy

    When it comes to our bowels — and their movements — we may not give them much thought. Of course, when things are not going well, we notice.

    However, bowel movements don’t just tell us about the health of our digestive system. This may sound strange, but signs of everything from diseases to stress may show up in your bathroom habits. The key is knowing what to look for — and what the signs may mean.

    Here are five tips to encourage healthy bowels:

    1. Don’t ignore rectal bleeding

    The first thing most people worry about when they have minor rectal bleeding is that they have a cancer. Of course, colon cancer is also a concern. But it’s the cause of rectal bleeding only 1 to 2 percent of the time.

     Two problems are usually responsible for blood on the paper, on the stool or in the toilet: hemorrhoids and anal fissures. The good news is that both problems are usually easy to fix.

    2. Be careful not to be overzealous when you wipe

    A lot of people assume they have hemorrhoids. May their bottoms itch and they feel extra skin down there as they wipe. Must be hemorrhoids, right?

    So they treat themselves with medicated wipes or cream. And yet the “hemorrhoids” don’t go away — they itch even more.

    Often, the problem is, ironically, being too clean. What happens is a circular process. Filled with good intentions, you try to keep yourself scrupulously clean by using flushable wipes. But the unexpected result is that this leads to itching and the feeling that you have hemorrhoids.

    3. Don’t treat the bathroom like a library

    Think of your time in the bathroom as a necessity, not an extended escape. If your toilet has stacks of magazines or books on the water tank, consider moving them to another room.

    Why? The more time you spend on the toilet, the more likely you will strain for bowel movements. Also, the seated position puts extra stress on your anal blood vessels. Both of these factors boost your risk of hemorrhoids.

    4. Get enough fiber in your diet

    The goal is to eat 25 to 35 grams of fiber each day. The lack of fiber in the American diet is perhaps the major problem that leads to issues with constipation.

    One of the challenges is that not all natural sources are equal in the amounts of fiber they contain, so you don’t always get a consistent amount of fiber intake every day, depending on what you eat. One day a bowl of oatmeal may do it. Another day a serving of broccoli may not.

    Of course, each person’s needs are different, too, so you have to find what works best for your body.

    5. Avoid dehydration if you have diarrhea

    The biggest danger with a short bout of diarrhea is dehydration, or the loss of water and nutrients from the body’s tissues. You could become dehydrated if you have diarrhea more than three times a day and are not drinking enough fluids. Dehydration can cause serious complications if it is not treated. The best way to guard against dehydration is to drink liquids that contain both salt and sugar.

(Source: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/2016/08/poop/) 

                                                            Words that went extinct

                                                                                                                                           By Kimberly Joki

Dictionaries incorporate new words every year. Some are pop culture inventions like jeggings, photobomb, and meme. Other words, like emoji and upvote, spring up from technology and social media. Dictionaries respond by creating definitions for anyone who cares to know what a twitterer is. And thank goodness they do; you can learn what an eggcorn is simply by turning a few pages in your trusty updated dictionary.

    Interestingly, not all newly added words are recent developments. The Oxford English Dictionary June 2015 new words list included autotune, birdhouse, North Korean, and shizzle! North Korea was founded in 1948. The initial release of the autotuner audio processor was in 1997. Before adding a slang term like shizzle, dictionary publishers weigh the current popularity, predicted longevity, and other factors. Just this year alone, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary welcomed about 1,700 new arrivals.

    With more and more words coined every year, dictionaries couldn’t possibly add them all to their existing word banks. Can you imagine a dictionary containing all the words ever used in English? It would be impossible to lift! With each yearly edit, dictionary editors must discard some words to make room for new ones.

(…)

    The Sami languages, spoken in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, reportedly include more than 150 words related to snow and ice. In the 1590s, the English language had a word for recently melted snow—snowbroth. Now, English speakers simply call it water or melted snow. In fact, words that are markedly specific seem more vulnerable to extinction. A 19th-century dictionary included Englishable, a term to describe how appropriate a word is for the English language. However, English is a dynamic language, always accepting and abandoning words. Apparently, Englishable itself isn’t Englishable; it’s now obsolete.

    Do you favor any infrequently used words? If so, use them now and often. . . A word’s best defense against extinction is regular use.

(Source: http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2015/words-that-went-extinct/)

TEXT I

How music is the real language of political diplomacy

Forget guns and bombs, it is the power of melody that has changed the world

Marie Zawisza

Saturday 31 October 2015 10.00 GMT

Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 201513.19 GMT 

An old man plays his cello at the foot of a crumbling wall. The notes of the sarabande of Bach’s Suite No 2 rise in the cold air, praising God for the “miracle” of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Mstislav Rostropovich later put it. The photograph is seen around the world. The date is 11 November 1989, and the Russian virtuoso is marching to the beat of history.

Publicity stunt or political act? No doubt a bit of both – and proof, in any case, that music can have a political dimension. Yo-Yo Ma showed as much in September when the cellist opened the new season of the Philharmonie de Paris with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As a “messenger of peace” for the United Nations, the Chinese American is the founder of Silk Road Project, which trains young musicians from a variety of cultures to listen to and improvise with each other and develop a common repertoire. “In this way, musicians create a dialogue and arrive at common policies,” says analyst Frédéric Ramel, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. By having music take the place of speeches and peace talks, the hope is that it will succeed where diplomacy has failed.[…]

Curiously, the study of the role of music in international relations is still in its infancy. “Historians must have long seen it as something fanciful, because history has long been dominated by interpretations that stress economic, social and political factors,” says Anaïs Fléchet, a lecturer in contemporary history at the Université de Versailles-St-Quentin and co-editor of a book about music and globalisation.

“As for musicologists,” she adds, “until quite recently they were more interested in analysing musical scores than the actual context in which these were produced and how they were received.” In the 1990s came a cultural shift. Scholars were no longer interested solely in “hard power” – that is, in the balance of powers and in geopolitics – but also in “soft power”, where political issues are resolved by mutual support rather than force. […] 

Gilberto Gil sings while then UN secretary general Kofi Annan plays percussion at a September 2003 concert at the UN headquarters honouring those killed by a bomb at a UN office in Baghdad a month earlier. Photograph: Zuma/Alamy 

Since then, every embassy has a cultural attaché. The US engages in “audio diplomacy” by financing hip-hop festivals in the Middle East. China promotes opera in neighbouring states to project an image of harmony. Brazil has invested in culture to assert itself as a leader in Latin America, notably by establishing close collaboration between its ministries of foreign affairs and culture; musician Gilberto Gil was culture minister during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva᾽s presidency from 2003 to 2008. He was involved in France’s Year of Brazil. As Fléchet recalls, “the free concert he gave on 13 July, 2005 at the Place de la Bastille was the pinnacle. That day, he sang La Marseillaise in the presence of presidents Lula and Jacques Chirac.” Two years earlier, in September 2003, Gil sang at the UN in honour of the victims of the 19 August bombing of the UN headquartes in Baghdad. He was delivering a message of peace, criticising the war on Iraq by the US: “There is no point in preaching security without giving a thought to respecting others,” he told his audience. Closing the concert, he invited then UN secretary general Kofi Annan on stage for a surprise appearance as a percussionist. “This highly symbolic image, which highlighted the conviction that culture can play a role in bringing people together, shows how music can become a political language,” Fléchet says. 

(adapted from http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/31 /music-language-human-rights-political-diplomacy) 

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow.

How Telecommuting Works

Telecommuting, which is growing in popularity, allows employees to avoid long commutes.

“Brring,” the alarm startles you out of a deep sleep. It’s 8 a.m. on Monday morning. Time to head to the office. You roll out of bed, brush your teeth and stumble your way to the kitchen to grab some coffee.

Moments later, you head to the office, still wearing your pajamas and fluffy slippers. Luckily for you, you don’t have to go far – you work at home. Telecommuting, or working at home, has grown in popularity over the last 20 years.

On an increasing basis, workers are saying “no” to long commutes and opting to work at home. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of employees working from home grew by 23 percent from 1990 to 2000.

Telecommuting workers revel in making their own schedule – allowing them to schedule work around family and personal commitments. With the ready availability of technology tools, like the Internet and home computers, companies are more willing to let employees work from home.

(Adapted from: http://home.howstuffworks.com/telecommuting.htm Access on 18 January, 2014)

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow.

WELCOME!

And congratulations on your new purchase. You’re now entitled to an unsurpassed service and a number of benefits as part of the Ericsson warranty and service program. Your Ericsson mobile phone was designed to offer you the ultimate in quality, convenience and performance. And of course, we guarantee it. From now on, as the new owner of an Ericsson mobile phone, you’ll have access to a number of exclusive advantages such as: a vast network of Ericsson service centers; a limited 1 year warranty and service agreement, and a toll-free customer service hotline.

WARRANTY CONDITIONS

Dear Customer,

If your Ericsson product needs warranty service, you should send the product to any company authorized service facility. For information contact the store from which you purchased the product. The product in all cases must be accompanied by the following items: your name, address, telephone number, warranty card, bill of sale bearing the serial number, date of delivery, or reasonable proof of these dates, and a detailed description of the problem.

Our warranty

This warranty is extended by Ericsson Inc. (“The Company”) to the original purchaser for use only. Ericsson warrants this product to be free of defects in material and workmanship at the time of its original purchase and for the subsequent period of one (1) year. All accessories for the product are covered for a period of one (1) year from the date of purchase.

What we will do

If, during the period of warranty, this product proves defective under normal use and service due to improper materials or workmanship, the company will repair or replace the defective item with a new or factory rebuilt replacement.

(Taken from Ericsson – One year Warranty and Service Agreement)

Atenção: Para responder às questões de números 16 a 20, considere o texto abaixo.

House Approves Higher Debt Limit Without Condition

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER

Feb. 11, 2014

WASHINGTON − Ending three years of brinkmanship in which the threat of a devastating default on the nation’s debt was used to wring conservative concessions from President Obama, the House on Tuesday voted to raise the government’s borrowing limit until March 2015, without any conditions.

The vote − 221 to 201 − relied almost entirely on Democrats in the Republican-controlled House to carry the measure and represented the first debt ceiling increase since 2009 that was not attached to other legislation. Only 28 Republicans voted yes, and only two Democrats voted no.

Simply by holding the vote, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio effectively ended a three-year Tea Party-inspired era of budget showdowns that had raised the threat of default and government shutdowns, rattled economic confidence and brought serious scrutiny from other nations questioning Washington’s ability to govern. In the process, though, Mr. Boehner also set off a series of reprisals from fellow Republican congressmen and outside groups that showcased the party’s deep internal divisions.

During the October 2013 government shutdown, The Times’s David Leonhardt explained the debt limit and how a failure to raise it could have affected the economy both at home and abroad.

“He gave the president exactly what he wanted, which is exactly what the Republican Party said we did not want,” said a Republican representative, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who last year unsuccessfully tried to rally enough support to derail Mr. Boehner’s re-election as speaker. “It’s going to really demoralize the base.”

The vote was a victory for President Obama, Democrats and those Senate Republicans who have argued that spending money for previously incurred obligations was essential for the financial standing of the federal government. “Tonight’s vote is a positive step in moving away from the political brinkmanship that’s a needless drag on our economy,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.

“A clean debt ceiling is a complete capitulation on the speaker’s part and demonstrates that he has lost the ability to lead the House of Representatives, let alone his own party,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. “It is time for him to go.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, commended the speaker and promised to pass the bill as soon as possible. “We’re happy to see the House is legislating the way they should have legislated for a long time,” he said.

(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/us/politics/ boehner-to-bring-debt-ceiling-to-vote-without-policyattachments. html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_2014021 2&_r=0)

            How Telecommuting Works

Telecommuting, which is growing in popularity, allows

employees to avoid long commutes.

“Brring,” the alarm startles you out of a deep sleep. It’s

8 a.m. on Monday morning. Time to head to the office.

You roll out of bed, brush your teeth and stumble your

way to the kitchen to grab some coffee.

Moments later, you head to the office, still wearing

your pajamas and fluffy slippers. Luckily for you, you

don’t have to go far – you work at home.

Telecommuting, or working at home, has grown in

popularity over the last 20 years.

On an increasing basis, workers are saying “no” to

long commutes and opting to work at home. In fact,

the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of

employees working from home grew by 23 percent

from 1990 to 2000.

Telecommuting workers revel in making their own

schedule – allowing them to schedule work around

family and personal commitments. With the ready

availability of technology tools, like the Internet and

home computers, companies are more willing to let

employees work from home.

    ( Adaptedfrom : < http: //home.howstuffworks.com/telecommuting.htm>Access on 18th January, 2014) 

THERE ARE 10 QUESTIONS OF MULTIPLE CHOICE IN YOUR TEST. EACH QUESTION HAS 4 ALTERNATIVES (A, B, C, AND D) FROM WHICH ONLY ONE IS CORRECT. CHECK THE CORRECT ONE.

O texto a seguir refere-se às questões 29, 30, 31 e 32.

Learning to quit

Jodi Hall started smoking at age 9.

By the time she was 16, she was up to a pack a day – and she wanted to quit. A couple of reasons: one, her health; two, a guy named Mony. “He said that when he kissed me, it was like kissing an ashtray”, Jodi says.

Earlier this year, Jodi, along with 25 of her classmates at Johnson High School, in Savannah, GA, enrolled in the school’s first stop-smoking class. During the eight-week Tobacco Free Teen class, they learned what smoking can do to their body, their wallet and their grades (some kids end up cutting class to satisfy their nicotine cravings). But it wasn’t just about scare tactics. The goal is behavior modification, not punishment, so students are taught techniques for handling stress and resisting the urge to light up even when friends or parents do.

According to the American Lung Association (ALA), which sponsors the class, about half the adults who smoke were regular smokers by age 18. “Theses numbers are only going to get worse,” says Kristine Lewis of the ALA. “The tobacco industry is turning to teens.”

How did the students do? Jodi has been cigaretteless for three months. But she’s the only one. Her classmate Adam Cushman is slowly putting his way back to three packs a day. The 16-year-old says he wants to stop, “but the way things are going, I doubt I’ll be able to.”

Seventeen, June 1996.