Questões de Vestibular de Inglês - Vocabulário | Vocabulary

                                Words that define the presente

At a time when the world is changing more quickly than ever before, we need a new vocabulary to help us grasp what’s happening.

      Catfishing. This word would make more sense if it referred to fishing for cats, but in fact, it refers to people who construct false identities online. Whether out of boredom, loneliness or malice, they lure other people into continued messaging correspondence, thereby building false relationships with them (the apparent source of the term “catfish” is a 2010 documentary called Catfish, whose verity, ironically enough, has been questioned).

      There are two ways of looking at this: 1) The internet/ cyberspace is wonderful, because it gives people the freedom to augment or totally change their identities, and this is a marvellous new dawn for human expression, a new step in human evolution. 2) Nah, it’s a false dawn, because the internet is essentially a libertarian arena, and, as such, an amoral one (lots of “freedoms” but with no attendant social obligations); it is a new jungle where we must watch our backs and struggle for survival, surely a backward step in evolution. I lean toward the latter.

                             (Cameron Laux. www.bbc.com, 08.08.2018. Adaptado.)

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Prescriptions for fighting epidemics 

    Epidemics have plagued humanity since the dawn of settled life. Yet, success in conquering them remains patchy. Experts predict that a global one that could kill more than 300 million people would come round in the next 20 to 40 years. What pathogen would cause it is anybody’s guess. Chances are that it will be a virus that lurks in birds or mammals, or one that that has not yet hatched. The scariest are both highly lethal and spread easily among humans. Thankfully, bugs that excel at the first tend to be weak at the other. But mutations – ordinary business for germs – can change that in a blink. Moreover, when humans get too close to beasts, either wild or packed in farms, an animal disease can become a human one.
    A front-runner for global pandemics is the seasonal influenza virus, which mutates so much that a vaccine must be custom-made every year. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 million to 100 million people, was a potent version of the “swine flu” that emerged in 2009. The H5N1 “avian flu” strain, deadly in 60% of cases, came about in the 1990s when a virus that sickened birds made the jump to a human. Ebola, HIV and Zika took a similar route.

                                                                                                     (www.economist.com, 08.02.2018. Adaptado.)

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Prescriptions for fighting epidemics 

    Epidemics have plagued humanity since the dawn of settled life. Yet, success in conquering them remains patchy. Experts predict that a global one that could kill more than 300 million people would come round in the next 20 to 40 years. What pathogen would cause it is anybody’s guess. Chances are that it will be a virus that lurks in birds or mammals, or one that that has not yet hatched. The scariest are both highly lethal and spread easily among humans. Thankfully, bugs that excel at the first tend to be weak at the other. But mutations – ordinary business for germs – can change that in a blink. Moreover, when humans get too close to beasts, either wild or packed in farms, an animal disease can become a human one.
    A front-runner for global pandemics is the seasonal influenza virus, which mutates so much that a vaccine must be custom-made every year. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 million to 100 million people, was a potent version of the “swine flu” that emerged in 2009. The H5N1 “avian flu” strain, deadly in 60% of cases, came about in the 1990s when a virus that sickened birds made the jump to a human. Ebola, HIV and Zika took a similar route.

                                                                                                     (www.economist.com, 08.02.2018. Adaptado.)