ATIVIDADE 3 DE READING 1.

Atividade de Aprendizagem nº 03

1. Leia o seguinte texto utilizando a estratégia Skimming e escreva com suas palavras sobre o que o texto aborda.

The electric light was a failure.

Maggie Koerth-Baker

Invented by the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, it spent nearly 80 years being passed from one initially hopeful researcher to another, like some not-quite-housebroken puppy. In 1879, Thomas Edison finally figured out how to make an incandescent light bulb that people would buy. But that didn’t mean the technology immediately became successful. It took another 40 years, into the 1920s, for electric utilities to become stable, profitable businesses. And even then, success happened only because the utilities created other reasons to consume electricity. They invented the electric toaster and the electric curling iron and found lots of uses for electric motors. They built Coney Island. They installed electric streetcar lines in any place large enough to call itself a town. All of this, these frivolous gadgets and pleasurable diversions, gave us the light bulb. We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn’t the goal; it’s everything that gets you there. It’s bad financial decisions and blueprints for machines that weren’t built until decades later. It’s the important leaps forward that synthesize lots of ideas,

and it’s the belly-up failures that teach us what not to do. When we ignore how innovation actually works, we make it hard to see what’s happening right in front of us today. If you don’t know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it’s easy to write off some modern energy innovations — like solar panels — because they haven’t hit the big time fast enough.

Worse, the fairy-tale view of history implies that innovation has an end. It doesn’t. What we want and what we need keeps changing. The incandescent light was a 19th-century failure and a 20th- century success. Now it’s a failure again, edged out by new technologies, like  LEDs, that were, themselves, failures for many years. That’s what this issue is about: all the little failures, trivialities and notquite-solved mysteries that make the successes possible. This is what innovation looks like. It’s messy, and it’s awesome.

_O texto trata de inovação e suas implicações e bate na tecla de como criamos mitos sobre um cara que teve uma grande ideia que mudou o mundo. Só que a inovação em si, não é objetivo, e sim, tudo o que leva você até lá. A luz elétrica foi um fracasso inicialmente e só alcançou o sucesso mais de um século depois. A lâmpada elétrica foi um fracasso no século 19 e um sucesso no século 20. O inventor da lâmpada elétrica, Thomas Alva Edison, definiu bem o sentido da inovação ao falar sobre o conceito de genialidade. “Gênio é um por cento de inspiração e noventa e nove por cento de transpiração” ele teria dito. 

2. Leia novamente o texto e diga qual sua ideia principal.

_ A ideia principal trata de inovação  e fracasso e inovação e sucesso, na forma como uma grande ideia encontra resistência na sua fase inicial, mas com o tempo, acaba sendo bem sucedida.

3. Veja o texto a seguir. Observando o título do texto, o que você pode dizer sobre o que texto irá abordar? E quais pontos você acha que ele irá tratar?

The History of Pizza

One of the most popular foods around the world today is pizza. Pizza restaurants are popular everywhere from Beijing to Moscow to Rio, and even in the United States, the home of the hamburger, there are more pizza restaurants than hamburger places. This worldwide love for pizza is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the 1950s, pizza was a purely Italian food, with a long history in southern Italy.

The origins of pizza are somewhat uncertain, though they may go back to the Greeks (pita bread) or even earlier. Under the Roman Empire, Italians often ate flat circles of bread, which they may have flavored with olive oil, cheese, and herbs.

By about the year 1000 A.D. in the area around Naples, this bread had a name: picea. This early kind of pizza lacked one of the main ingredients we associate with pizza: the tomato. In fact, tomatoes did not exist in Europe until the sixteenth century, when Spanish explorers brought them back from South America. The Spanish showed little interest in tomatoes, but southern Italians soon began to cultivate them and use them in cooking. At some point in the 1600s, Neapolitan tomatoes were added to pizza, as it was known by then.

The next development in pizza making came about, according to legend, in June 1889, when a Neapolitan pizza maker was asked to make pizza for the king and queen. To show his patriotism, he decided to make it green, white, and red, like the Italian flag, using basil leaves, mozzarella and tomato. He named his pizza "Margherita," after the queen, and that is what this classic kind of pizza is still called today. In Italy, pizza remained a specialty of Naples and other areas of the south until well into the twentieth century. Then, in the 1950s and 60s, when many southerners moved to the north to work in the new factories, pizzerias opened up in many northern Italian cities. By the 1980s, they could be found all over the country and pizza had become a part of the Italian way of life.

Today, pizza has become so common in so many countries that its Italian origins are often forgotten. Indeed, the global versions of pizza made with all kinds of ingredients have little in common with the Neapolitan original, as anyone knows who has tasted a pizza in Naples.

(Source: Wikipedia.com)

Supporting points (main ideas):

_O texto trata da história da Pizza, sua origem e a forma como ela se espalhou pelo mundo

Paragraph 2:

_ A origem da Pizza é incerta, sendo sua invenção atribuída aos gregos inicialmente, embora no Império Romano, existisse um preparado de massa com azeite de oliva, queijo e ervas.

Paragraph 3:

_ Por volta do ano 1000 d.C, em Nápoles ela recebeu o nome de “picea”, ou seja, Pizza, embora o tomate, um de seus ingredientes mais populares só tenha sido adicionado por volta de 1600 d.C.

Paragraph 4:

_ Em junho de 1889, um pizzaiolo napolitano, preparou um pizza com as cores da bandeira italiana, em homenagem ao Rei e à Rainha. Nas cores verde, branco e vermelho, surgia a pizza batizada de “Margherita”

Paragraph 5:

_ A partir dos anos 50 do século 20, as pizzarias se espalharam pela Itália e nos anos 80, a pizza era parte integrante do jeito italiano de ser.

Paragraph 6:

_ Nos tempos atuais a pizza está presente em todo o mundo, e a sua origem italiana é com frequência esquecida.

. Atividade de Aprendizagem nº 04

Leia os textos a seguir e responda as perguntas abaixo:

TEXTO 1:

World Hunger and Resources

The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition. According to the British group Vegfam, a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn and only two producing cattle. Britain—with 56 million people—could support a population of 250 million on an all-vegetable diet. Because 90 percent of U.S. and European meat eaters" grain consumption is indirect (first being fed to animals), westerners each consume 2,000 pounds of grain a year. Most grain in underdeveloped countries is consumed directly.

While it is true that many animals graze on land that would be unsuitable for cultivation, the demand for meat has taken millions of productive acres away from farm inventories. The cost of that is incalculable. As Diet For a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé writes, imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. "Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the "feed cost" of your steak, each of their bowls could be filledwith a full cup of cooked cereal grains."

Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people. Authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich note that a pound of wheat can be grown with 60 pounds of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500to 6,000 pounds.

TEXTO 2:

Telefonica and Vodafone to Combine Mobile Forces in Britain

BERLIN — Telefónica and Vodafone said Thursday they planned to combine their wireless phone grids in Britain and jointly build a new, superfast network to keep pace with the market leader, Everything Everywhere, a joint venture of T-Mobile and France Télécom. Combining the networks of O2 U.K., the No. 2 British operator owned by Telefónica, and Vodafone U.K., the No. 3, will enable the carriers to split the costs of building a national mobile broadband network next year using Long Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. The British government plans to sell broadcast spectrum for LTE service by the end of this year.

At a press conference in London, the Vodafone U.K. chief executive, Guy Laurence, and the Telefónica U.K. chief executive, Ronan Dunne, said the carriers would continue to operate competing services and would even bid against each other in Britain’s upcoming 4G spectrum auction.

But the combination will let both save on operating and equipment costs. One physical grid running independent networks will mean greater efficiency, fewer site builds, broader coverage and, crucially, investment in innovation and better competition for the customer,” Mr. Dunne said.

Europe’s mobile phone market has roughly 60 distinct network operators, according to the GSM Association, a London group representing the industry. That level of infrastructure is about three times the density in North America and Asia, and operators are increasingly collaborating on grids with rivals to reduce operating costs and future upgrades.

Vodafone and Telefónica plan to place their U.K. networks into a 50-50 venture, which will encompass a combined 18,500 cell tower masts, an increase of roughly 40 percent for each operator. Telefónica already shares its network with Vodafone in Spain and with T-Mobile in the Czech Republic. The U.K. venture expands on a previous equipment sharing partnership called Cornerstone between O2 and Vodafone begun in 2009.

(…)

Fonte: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/technology/telefonica-and-vodafone-tocombine-

mobile-forces-in-britain.html?ref=technology#h[BTaBTa]

1. Em qual dos textos você encontra dados sobre a fome no mundo? Como você achou essa informação?

_ No texto 1. A partir da afirmação de que pessoas ainda passam fome no mundo e sofrem de desnutrição, decorrente da falta de alimentos.

2. O que indicam os números no parágrafo 02 do texto 01? Que conclusão você tira da leitura desses números?

_ Indicam a área de campos que podem ser cultivados para tornar auto-suficiente um determinado grupo de pessoas.

3. Quem é o nutricionista de Harvard e o que ele pensa sobre a questão da

distribuição de alimentos? Onde você encontrou essa informação?

_ O nutricionista Jean Mayer, estima que uma redução de dez por cento na produção de carne nos Estados Unidos, pode estimular a produção de grãos suficiente para alimentar 60 milhões de pesssoas.

Esta informação consta do último parágrafo do texto 01.

4. Em que texto você encontra dados sobre a união de duas companhias

telefônicas na Inglaterra? O que levou você a perceber isso?

_ No texto 2. O próprio título do texto enfatiza que as duas companhias pretendem juntar forças para dominar o mercado de telefonia no Reino Unido.