How to beat loneliness

Loneliness is a subjective feeling. You may be surrounded by other people, friends, family, workmates — yet still feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. Other people are not guaranteed to shield us against the raw emotional pain that loneliness inflicts.

But raw emotional pain is only the beginning of the damage loneliness can cause. It has a huge impact on our physical health as well. Loneliness activates our physical and psychological stress responses and suppresses the function of our immune systems. This puts us at increased risk for developing all kinds of illness and diseases, including cardiovascular disease. Shockingly, the longterm risk chronic loneliness poses to our health and longevity is so severe, it actually increases risk of an early death by 26%.

There are many paths to loneliness. Some enter loneliness gradually. A friend moves away, another has a child, a third works a seventy-hour work week, and before we know it our social circle, the one we had relied upon for years, ceases to exist. Others enter loneliness more suddenly, when they leave for college or the military, lose a partner to death or divorce, start a new job, or move to a new town or country. And for some, chronic illness, disability or other limiting conditions have made loneliness a lifelong companion.

Unfortunately, emerging from loneliness is far more challenging than we realize, as the psychological wounds it inflicts create a trap from which it is difficult to break free. Loneliness distorts our perceptions, making us believe the people around us care much less than they actually do, and it makes us view our existing relationships more negatively, such that we see them as less meaningful and important than we would if we were not lonely.

These distorted perceptions have a huge ripple effect, creating self-fulfilling prophecies that ensnare many. Feeling emotionally raw and convinced of our own undesirability and of the diminished caring of others, we hesitate to reach out even as we are likely to respond to overtures from others with hesitance, resentment, skepticism or desperation, effectively pushing away the very people who could alleviate our condition.

As a result, many lonely people withdraw and isolate themselves to avoid risking further rejection or disappointment. And when they do venture into the world, their hesitance and doubts are likely to create the very reaction they fear. They will force themselves to attend a party but feel so convinced others won’t talk to them, they spend the entire evening parked by the hummus and vegetable dip with a scowl on their face, and indeed, no one dares approach — which for them only verifies their fundamental undesirability. […] 

(Source: Guy Winch, at TED Ideas. Retrieved at: http://ideas.ted.com/how-tobeat-loneliness/) 

Available at:< https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/magazine/a-diagnosis-update-a-young-womans-extreme-muscle-pain-persists.html>. Acess on: Aug. 10, 2018 

Read the excerpt below and answer the questions 34 to 40.

1. The transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States formed one of those unbelievable incidents of
2. history because by 1867, Russia was nervously eager to get rid of it, while the United States still
3. recovering from the Civil War and immersed in the impending impeachment of President Johnson,
4. refused to accept it on any terms.
5. At this impasse an extraordinary man monopolized center stage. He was not a Russian, a fact which
6. would become important more than a century later, but a soi-disant baron of dubious background; half
7. Austrian, half Italian, and a charmer who was picked up in 1841 for temporary duty representing Russia in
8. the United States and who lingered there till 1868. In that time, Edouard de Stoeckl, parading himself as a
9. nobleman, although no one could say for sure how or when or even if he had earned his title, became
10. such an ardent friend of America that he married an American heiress and took upon himself the task of
11. acting as marriage broker between Russia, which he called homeland, and the United States, his adopted
12. residence.
13. He faced a most difficult task, for when the United States showed hesitancy about accepting Alaska,
14. support for the sale withered in Russia, and later when Russia wanted to sell, half a dozen of the most
15. influential American politicians led by Secretary of State William Seward of New York looked far into the
16. future and saw the desirability of acquiring Alaska to serve as America's artic bastion, yet the hard-
17. headed businessmen in the Senate, the House and the general public opposed the purchase with all the
18. scorn they could summon. 'Seward's Icebox' and 'Seward's Folly' were two of the gentler jibes. Some
19. critics accused Seward of being in the pay of the Russians; others accused De Stoeckl of buying votes in
20. the House. One sharp satirist claimed that Alaska contained nothing but polar bears and Eskimos, and
21. many protested that America should not accept this useless, frozen domain even if Russia wanted to give
22. it away.
23. Many pointed out that Alaska had no wealth of any kind, not even reindeer, which proliferated in other
24. northern areas, and experts affirmed that an arctic area like this could not possibly have any minerals or
25. other deposits of value. On and on went the abuse of this unknown and somewhat terrifying land, and the
26. castigations would have been comical had they not influenced American thinking and behavior and
27. condemned Alaska to decades of neglect.
28. But an ingenious man like Baron de Stoeckl was not easily diverted from his main target, and with
29. Seward's unflinching support and admirable statesmanship, the sale squeaked by with a favorable margin
30. of one vote. By such a narrow margin did the United States come close to losing one of her potentially
31. valuable acquisitions, but of course, had one viewed Alaska from the vantage point of frozen Fort Nulato
32. in 1867, with the thermometer at minus-fifty-seven and about to be attacked by hostile Athapascans, the
33. purchase at more than $7,000,000 would have seemed a poor bargain.
34. Now the comedy intensified, became burlesque, for although the U.S Senate had bought the place,
35. the U.S. House refused to appropriate the money to pay for it, and for many tense months the sale hung
36. in the balance. When a favorable vote was finally taken, it was almost negated by the discovery that
37. Baron de Stoeckl had disposed of $125,000 in cash for which he refused to give an accounting. Widely
38. suspected of having bribed congressmen to vote for land that was obviously worthless, the baron waited
39. until the sale was completed, then quietly slipped out of the country, his life's ambition having been
40. achieved.
41. One congressman with a keen sense of history, economics and geopolitics said of the whole affair:
42. 'If we were so eager to show Russia our appreciation of the help she gave us during the Civil War, why
43. didn't we give her the seven million and tell her to keep her damned colony? It'll never be of any use to
44. us.'

Excerpt from: MICHENER, James A. Alaska. Fawcett Books: New York, 1988, p. 369 - 370.

Instructions: Question are based on the following text.

Source: http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=124967

BRAZILIAN INDIANS

    The history of Brazil's indigenous peoples has been marked by brutality, slavery, violence, diseases, and genocide.
    When the first European colonists arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by an estimated 11 million Indians, living in about 2,000 tribes. Within the rst century of contact, 90% were wiped out, mainly through diseases imported by the colonists, such as fiu, measles and smallpox. In the following centuries, thousands more died, enslaved in the rubber and sugar cane plantations.
    By the 1950s the population has dropped to such a low that the eminent senator and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro predicted there would be none left by the year 1980. On average, it is estimated that one tribe became extinct every year over the last century.   
    In 1967, a federal prosecutor named Jader Figueiredo published a 7,000 page report cataloguing thousands of atrocities and crimes committed against the Indians, ranging from murder to land theft to enslavement.
     In one notorious case known as 'The th massacre of the 11 parallel', a rubber baron ordered his men to hurl sticks of dynamite into a Cinta Larga village. Those who survived were murdered when rubber workers entered the village on foot and attacked them with machetes.         

    The report made int e rna tiona l headlines and led to the disbanding of the government's Indian Protection Service (SPI) which was replaced by FUNAI. This remains the government' s indigenous a ff a ir s department today.