Questões de Concurso

Planes top 800 mph as near-record winds sweep high over Mid-Atlantic

(Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/18/record-jet-stream-winds-dc-flights/ – text specially adapted for this test)

Instruction: answer questions 31 to 40 based on the following text. The highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.

He donated blood and saved the lives of 2.4 million babies

01 Most people get a gold watch when they retire. James Harrison deserves so much more than

02 that. Known as the “Man With the Golden Arm,” Harrison has donated blood nearly every week

03 for 60 years, and after all those donations, the 81-year-old Australian man “retired” Friday.

04 According to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, he has helped save the lives of more than

05 2.4 million Australian babies because his blood has unique, disease-fighting antibodies.

06 Harrison’s antibodies have been used to develop an injection called Anti-D, which helps

07 fight against rhesus disease. This disease is a condition where a pregnant woman has rhesus-

08 negative blood (RhD negative) and the baby in her womb has rhesus-positive blood (RhD

09 positive), inherited from its father. If the mother has been sensitized to rhesus-positive blood,

10 usually during a previous pregnancy with a rhesus-positive baby, she may produce antibodies

11 that destroy the baby’s “foreign” blood cells. In the worst cases, it can result in brain damage,

12 or death, for the babies.

13 Harrison’s remarkable gift of giving started when he had major chest surgery when he was

14 just 14. Blood donations saved his life, so he pledged to become a blood donor. A few years

15 later, doctors discovered his blood contained the antibody which could be used to create Anti-D

16 injections, so he switched over to making blood plasma donations to help as many people as

17 possible. Doctors aren’t exactly sure why Harrison has this rare blood type, but they think it

18 might be from the transfusions he received when he was 14, after his surgery. He’s one of no

19 more than 50 people in Australia known to have the antibodies, according to the blood service.

20 “In Australia, up until about 1967, there were literally thousands of babies dying each year,

21 doctors didn’t know why, and it was awful.” Jemma Falkenmire, of the Australian Red Cross

22 Blood Service, told CNN. “Australia was one of the first countries to discover a blood donor with

23 this antibody, so it was quite revolutionary at the time.”

24 The blood service estimates Harrison saved more than two million lives, and for that, he is

25 considered a national hero in Australia. He’s won numerous awards for his generosity, including

26 the Medal of the Order of Australia, one of the country’s most prestigious honors. Now that

27 Harrison has given his last blood donation (in Australia you can’t donate blood past the age of

28 81), Falkenmire and others hope people with similar antibodies in their blood will step up and

29 donate.

(Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blood-donor-retires-trnd/index.html – text especially adapted for this test).