Reading skill will help you to improve your understanding of the language and build your vocabulary.

Social Media Across Generations

Today’s grandparents are joining their grandchildren on social media, but the different generations’ online habits couldn’t be more different. In the UK the over-55s are joining Facebook in increasing numbers, meaning that they will soon be the site’s second biggest user group, with 3.5 million users aged 55-64 and 2.9 million over-65s.

Sheila, aged 59, says, I joined to see what my grandchildren are doing, as my daughter posts videos and photos of them. It’s a much better way to see what they’re doing than waiting for letters and photos in the post. That’s how we did it when I was a child, but I think I’m lucky I get to see so much more of their lives than my grandparents did.

Ironically, Sheila’s grandchildren are less likely to use Facebook themselves. Children under 17 in the UK are leaving the site – only 2.2 million users are under 17 – but they’re not going far from their smartphones. Chloe, aged 15, even sleeps with her phone. It’s my alarm clock so I have to she says. I look at it before I go to sleep and as soon as I wake up.

Unlike her grandmother’s generation, Chloe’s age group is spending so much time.......... their phones.......... home that they are missing out on spending time with their friends in real life. Sheila, on the other hand, has made contact with old friends from school she hasn’t heard...................40 years. We use Facebook to arrange to meet all over the country, she says. It’s changed my social life completely.

Teenagers might have their parents to thank for their smartphone and social media addiction as their parents were the early adopters of the smartphone. Peter, 38 and father of two teenagers, reports that he used to be on his phone or laptop constantly. I was always connected and I felt like I was always working, he says. How could I tell my kids to get off their phones if I was always in front of a screen myself? So, in the evenings and at weekends, he takes his SIM card out of his smartphone and puts it into an old-style mobile phone that can only make calls and send text messages. I’m not completely cut off from the world in case of emergencies, but the important thing is I’m setting a better example to my kids and spending more quality time with them.

Text

Reading skill will help you to improve your understanding of the language and build your vocabulary.

Read the text below carefully.

Social media, magazines and shop windows bombard people daily with things to buy, and British consumers are buying more clothes and shoes than ever before. Online shopping means it is easy for customers to buy without thinking, while major brands offer such cheap clothes that they can be treated like disposable items – worn two or three times and then thrown away

In Britain, the average person spends more than £1,000 on new clothes a year, which is around four per cent of their income. That might not sound like much, but that figure hides two far more worrying trends for society and for the environment. First, a lot of that consumer spending is via credit cards. British people currently owe approximately £670 per adult to credit card companies. That’s 66 per cent of the average wardrobe budget. Also, not only are people spending money they don’t have, they’re using it to buy things they don’t need. Britain throws away 300,000 tons of clothing a year, most of which goes into landfill sites.

People might not realize they are part of the disposable clothing problem because they donate their unwanted clothes to charities. But charity shops can’t sell all those unwanted clothes. Fast fashion goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in and is often too poor quality to recycle; people don’t want to buy it second-hand. Huge quantities end up being thrown away, and a lot of clothes that charities can’t sell are sent abroad, causing even more economic and environmental problems.

However, a different trend is springing up in opposition to consumerism – the ‘buy nothing’ trend. The idea originated in Canada in the early 1990s and then moved to the US, where it became a rejection of the overspending and overconsumption of Black Friday and Cyber Monday during Thanksgiving weekend. On Buy Nothing Day people organize various types of protests and cut up their credit cards. Throughout the year, Buy Nothing groups organize the exchange and repair of items they already own.

The trend has now reached influencers on social media who usually share posts of clothing and make- -up that they recommend for people to buy. Some YouTube stars now encourage their viewers not to buy anything at all for periods as long as a year. Two friends in Canada spent a year working towards buying only food. For the first three months they learned how to live without buying electrical goods, clothes or things for the house. For the next stage, they gave up services, for example haircuts, eating out at restaurants or buying petrol for their cars. In one year, they’d saved $55,000. 

The changes they made meant two fewer cars on the roads, a reduction in plastic and paper packaging and a positive impact on the environment from all the energy saved. If everyone followed a similar plan, the results would be impressive. But even if you can’t manage a full year without going shopping, you can participate in the anti-consumerist movement by refusing to buy things you don’t need. Buy Nothing groups send a clear message to companies that people are no longer willing to accept the environmental and human cost of overconsumption.

source: learnenglish.britishcouncil.org

Technology Consultant Fast Track: How to Get Your Dream Job in IT Consulting (IT Consulting Career Guide).

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As a fresh graduate looking for your first job, if you just do what almost everybody else is doing…you will land a hellhole job with lousy pay, long hours, nasty coworkers, and exclusively clients from hell (because you thought it was your only option to go forward in your career). If you are serious and can apply simple instructions, this book can help you become a high-paid IT consultant in your dream job by the end of the month!

If you already have your first or second job in the field of IT, or even have 20 years of work experience, this book will tell you what a great option a career in IT consulting can be. With this book, you can find out why your current job is not satisfying your career aspirations and turn your career around for the better!

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What your college professor didn't tell you about the consulting business.

The Pro’s and Con’s of a career in technology consulting.

What other options do you have besides working for one of the global consulting giants such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG, or PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

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Read Text II and answer question 

University Degree Sill Best Way into Good Job 

        How do you get a good job? It might literally be a milliondollar question. And researchers from Georgetown University in the US have an answer: the best way is still to get a college education, even if you're a little late. That's their simple answer – one they came up with after looking at US government data for more than 8,000 Americans who were born in the early 1980s. They found that getting a bachelor's degree by the age of 26 gave people a 56% chance of getting a good job by the age of 30. For their study, the researchers defined a "good job" as one paying at least $ 38,000 for workers under the age of 45.

        According to The Wall Street Journal, the research didn't focus on people who went straight to college after finishing high school because they already have a high chance of getting a good job. Instead, it looked at different pathways that people who didn't go straight to college after high school could take to increase their chances of getting a good job. For example, even just beginning a bachelor's degree by age 22 increased the likelihood of getting a good job by 16 percentage points, according to the report. But despite this evidence, according to a separate Wall Street Journal survey, more than half of people don't feel that doing a four-year degree is worth the cost, because students may finish without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt.

        According to US News, in the academic year that ended in the summer of 2023, the average cost of going to an American university for a year started at about $ 10,000 for a public university, and went as high as almost $ 40,000 for a private school. And Zach Mabel, one of the authors of the Georgetown report, admits that although a university education is likely to be beneficial, for financial reasons "the risk of pursuing higher education is higher than it's ever been."

Source: https://engoo.com.br/app/daily-news/article/study-university-degree-stillbest-way-into-good-job/crbIxBR3Ee6ComdOtgdXYw

TEXT 1

                                                   Why is music good for the brain?

                                                                                                                                                October 7, 2020

    By Andrew E. Budson, MD, Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing

1. Can music really affect your well-being, learning, cognitive function, quality of life, and even happiness? Hand in a recent survey on music and brain health conducted by AARP revealed some interesting findings about the impact of music on cognitive and emotional well-being: music listeners had higher scores for mental well-being and slightly reduced levels of anxiety and depression compared to people overall.

2. Of survey respondents who currently go to musical performances, 69% rated their brain health as “excellent” or “very good,” compared to 58% for those who went in the past and 52% for those who never attended. Of those who reported often being exposed to music as a child, 68% rated their ability to learn new things as “excellent” or “very good,” compared to 50% of those who were not exposed to music.

3. Active musical engagement, including those over age 50, was associated with higher rates of happiness and good cognitive function. Adults with no early music exposure but who currently engage in some music appreciation show above average mental well-being scores. Those are pretty impressive results, to be sure. However, this 20-minute online survey has some limitations. For one, it included 3,185 US adults ages 18 and older; that is a small number if you are extrapolating to 328 million people across the country. For another, it is really a survey of people’s opinions. For example, although people might report their brain health as “excellent,” there was no objective measure of brain health such as an MRI scan, or even a test to measure their cognition.

4. Lastly, even if the ratings were true, the findings are only correlations. They do not prove that, for example, it was the exposure to music as a child that led to one’s improved ability to learn new things. It may be equally likely that those children brought up in more affluent households were both more likely to be exposed to music and to be given a good education that led to their being able to easily learn new things later in life.

5. Music has been shown to activate some of the broadest and most diverse networks of the brain. Of course, music activates the auditory cortex in the temporal lobes close to your ears, but that’s just the beginning. The parts of the brain involved in emotion are not only activated during emotional music, they are also synchronized. Music also activates a variety of memory regions. And, interestingly, music activates the motor system. In fact, it has been theorized that it is the activation of the brain’s motor system that allows us to pick out the beat of the music even before we start tapping our foot to it!

6. Okay, get along! so music activates just about all of the brain. Why is that so important? Well, have you ever heard the expression, “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it”? It turns out this is actually true in the brain. Brain pathways — and even whole networks — are strengthened when they are used and are weakened when they are not used. The reason is that the brain is efficient; it isn’t going to bother keeping a brain pathway strong when it hasn’t been used in many years. The brain will use the neurons in that pathway for something else. These types of changes should be intuitively obvious to you — that’s why it is harder to speak that foreign language if you haven’t used it in 20 years; many of the old pathways have degraded and the neurons are being used for other purposes.

BUDSON, Andrew E. Why is music good for the brain? Harvard Health Publishing, 7 out. 2020. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 12 maio 2024

“The professional of Teaching English as a Foreign Language”

Author: Anderson Francisco Guimarães Maia

Read the text III to answer the question.

TEXT III 

A new report into world education shows Finland has the best system. The global study is called "The Learning Curve" and is from the British magazine "The Economist". It aims to help governments provide a better education to students. The 52-page report looked at the education system in 50 countries. Researchers analysed millions of statistics on exam grades, literacy rates, attendance, and university graduation rates. Asia did well in the report, with South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore finishing second, third, fourth and fifth. The United States came 17th in the study, while Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia filled the bottom three positions in the top 50. 

The Learning Curve reported on five things that education leaders should remember. The first is that spending lots of money on schools and teachers does not always mean students will learn. Second is that "good teachers are essential to high-quality education". The report said teachers should be "treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine". Numbers three and four are that a country's culture must have a strong focus on the importance of education, and parents have a key part to play. Finally, countries need to "educate for the future, not just the present." The report said: "Many of today's job titles…simply did not exist 20 years ago."

Sources:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=421944&c=1 http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/content/download/bankname/components/filename/FINAL%20LearningCurve_Final.pdf 3