The Disappearing Honeybee

• Honeybees do more than just make honey. They fly around and pollinate flowers, plants, and trees. Our fruits, nuts, and vegetables rely.....................these pollinators. One third.....................America’s food supply is pollinated.....................the honeybee.

Have you seen or heard a honeybee lately? Bees are mysteriously disappearing in many parts of the world. Most people don’t know about this problem. It is called “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). Some North American beekeepers lost 80% of their hives from 2006-2008. Bees in Italy and Australia are disappearing too.

The disappearance of the honeybee is a serious problem. Can you imagine never eating another blueberry? What about almonds and cherries? Without honeybees food prices will skyrocket. The poorest people always suffer the worst when there is a lack of food.

This problem affects other foods besides fresh produce. Imagine losing your favourite ice cream! Haagen Daaz is a famous ice cream company. Many of their flavours rely on the hard working honeybee. In 2008, Haagen Daaz began raising money for CCD. They also funded a garden at the University of California called The Haven. This garden helps raise awareness about the disappearing honeybee and teaches visitors how to plant for pollinators.

Donating money to research is the most important thing humans can do to save the honeybee. Some scientists blame CCD on climate change. Others think pesticides are killing the bees. Commercial bee migration may also cause CCD. Beekeepers transport their hives from place to place in order to pollinate plants year round.

https://www.englishclub.com/reading/environment/honeybee.htm

     In order for collection of sentences and utterances to succed effectively, the discourse needs to be organised or conducted in such a way that it will be successful. In written English this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order. (…)

      No matter how coherent a text is, however, it will not work unless it has internal cohesion. The elements in that text must cohere or stick to each other successfully to help us navigate our way around the stretch of discourse. One way of achieving this is through lexical cohesion, and a way of ensuring lexical cohesion is through the repetition of words and phrases. (…) We can also use interrelated words and meanings to bind a text together (…)

      Another similar cohesive technique is that of substitution, using a phrase to refer to something we have already written. (…) Writers also use linkers such as and, also, moreover (…)

      These features are also present in spoken language, which also shows many examples of ellipsis (where words from a written-grammar version of an utterance are left out without compromising the meaning of what is said). (…)

                      (Harmer, J. The practice of English language teaching. 2007. Adapted)

Read the two cartoons and answer questions.

                                   A Free Press Needs You

By The Editorial Board

August 15, 2018

      In 1787, the year the Constitution was adopted in the USA, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to a friend, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

      That’s how he felt before he became president, anyway. Twenty years later, after enduring the oversight of the press from inside the White House, he was less sure of its value. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he wrote. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

      Jefferson’s discomfort was, and remains, understandable. Reporting the news in an open society is an enterprise laced with conflict. His discomfort also illustrates the need for the right of free press he helped to preserve. As the founders believed from their own experience, a well-informed public is best equipped to root out corruption and, over the long haul, promotes liberty and justice. “Public discussion is a political duty,” the Supreme Court said in 1964. That discussion must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” and “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

(www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/15/opinion/editorials/free-press-local -journalism-news-donald-trump.html?action=click&module=Trending& pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Trending. Adaptado.)

What is Alzheimer’s disease?

There are many types and causes of dementia, but Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form, accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all cases.  

Common early symptoms of Alzheimer’s include short-term memory loss, apathy and depressed mood, but these symptoms are often just seen as being a part of normal ageing, making early diagnosis difficult. 

Doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s on the basis of medical examination, patient history and cognitive tests, and can use imaging to rule out other forms of dementia. However, a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is only possible after death, when examination of brain tissue can reveal whether a person had the deposits of amyloid and tau proteins that are characteristic of the condition. 

            Source http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3333(adapted)

            Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau3333

            This article was updated on 30 January 2019 to add more detail and comment

            Access: April 20th, 2019

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 

TEXT IV

Throughout the last 15 years our society has undergone two major changes: Firstly, there has been a steady rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration; secondly, there has been the rapid development of technological devices and the world-wide expansion of new communications media. These changes directly affect the lives of our pupils at home and at school and thus have an important impact on curricular development, teaching objectives, contents and methodologies – starting as early as in primary school.

[…] 

While traditionally being literate solely referred to the ability to read and write in a standardized form of one language, literate practices today incorporate multimodal, critical, cultural, and media competencies next to traditional-functional language skills, like reading, writing, speaking, mediating, and listening in many languages. 

One major aspect in this context is the changing nature of texts that has developed from advances in technology. Language learners today need to be able to cope with different kinds of texts, including multimodal, interactive, linear, and nonlinear texts, texts in different languages, texts with several possible meanings, texts being delivered on paper, screens, or live, and texts that comprise one or more semiotic system. 

In order to prepare students to actively engage in a socially diverse, globalized, and technological world, teachers need to find new forms of teaching and learning and provide opportunities for their pupils to explore, learn about, and critically engage with a broad variety of texts and differing literate practices. Still, the question remains open as to how these principles and objectives of a multiliteracies pedagogy translate into examples of good practice in school settings.

(Source: adapted from ELSNER, D. Developing multiliteracies, plurilingual awareness & critical thinking in the primary language classroom with multilingual virtual talking books. Encuentro 20, 2011, pp. 27- 38.https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED530011) 

TEXT II

What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book

Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham. 

The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics. 

Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.) 

Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos. 

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]

(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)

INSTRUCTIONS: Read the text carefully and then answer the questions from 33 to 38 by choosing the correct alternative.

Brazil corruption scandals: All you need to know

For the past three years, Brazil has been gripped by a scandal which started with a state-owned oil company and grew to encapsulate people at the very top of business - and even presidents.

On the face of it, it is a straightforward corruption scandal - albeit one involving millions of dollars in kickbacks and more than 80 politicians and members of the business elite.

But as the tentacles of the investigation dubbed Operation Car Wash fanned out, other scandals emerged.

It has led to some of those who have found themselves accused claiming they are the victims of political plots, designed to bar them from office.

What is Operation Car Wash?

Operation Car Wash began in March 2014 as an investigation into allegations that Brazil's biggest construction firms overcharged state-oil company Petrobras for building contracts.

Investigators accused directors at the firm - named the world's most ethical oil and gas company in 2008 - of skimming the extra money off the top as a bribe for awarding the contract.

Which is bad enough - but then the Workers' Party found itself dragged into the corruption scandal amid allegations of having funneled some of these funds to pay off politicians and buy their votes and help with political campaigns.

Among those accused in the scandal were dozens of politicians, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - the country's extremely popular former president, known affectionately as "Lula".