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What is Philosophy for?
From a distance, philosophy seems weird, irrelevant, boring – and yet also just a little intriguing. But what are philosophers really for? The answer is helpfully already contained in the word ‘philosophy’ itself: in Ancient Greek, philo means love and sophia means wisdom. Philosophers are people who are devoted to wisdom. Being wise means attempting to live – and die – well. In the pursuit of wisdom, philosophers have developed a very specific skill set: they have over the centuries become experts in many of the things that make people not very wise. Five stand out:
1. We don’t ask big questions
There are lots of big questions around: What’s the meaning of life? What’s a job for? How should society be arranged? Most of us entertain them every now and then. But we despair of trying to answer them. They have the status almost of jokes. We call them pretentious, but they matter deeply, because only with sound answers to them, can we direct our energies meaningfully. Philosophers are people unafraid of asking big questions. They have over the centuries asked the very largest. They realise that these questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks, and that the only really pretentious thing is to think one’s above raising naive-sounding inquiries.
2. We are vulnerable to errors of common sense
Public opinion, or what gets called ‘common sense’, is sensible and reasonable in countless areas. It’s what you hear about from friends and neighbours – the stuff you take in without even thinking about it. But common sense is often also full of daftness and error. Philosophy gets us to admit all aspects of common sense to reason. It wants us to think for ourselves. Is it really true what people say about love, money, children, travel, work? Philosophers are interested in asking whether an idea is logical, rather than assuming it must be right because it’s popular and long established.
3. We are mentally confused
We are not very good at knowing what goes on in our own minds. Someone we meet is very annoying, but we can’t pin down what the issue is, or we lose our temper but we can’t readily tell what we’re so cross about. We lack insights into our own satisfactions and dislikes. That’s why we need to examine our own minds. Philosophy is committed to self-knowledge and it’s central precept, articulated by the earliest, greatest philosopher Socrates, is just two words long: know yourself.
4. We have muddled ideas about what makes us happy
We’re not very good at making ourselves happy. We overrate the power of some things to improve our lives and underrate others. We make the wrong choices because, guided by advertising and false glamour, we keep on imagining that a particular kind of holiday or car or computer will make a bigger difference than it can. At the same time, we underestimate the contribution of other things, like going for a walk, which may have little prestige but which can contribute deeply to the character of existence. Philosophers seek to be wise by getting more precise about the activities and attitudes that really can help our lives to go better.
5. We panic and lose perspective
Philosophers are good at keeping a sense of what really matters and what doesn’t. On hearing the news that he’d lost all his possessions to a shipwreck, the Stoic philosopher Zeno simple said, ‘fortune commands me to be a less encumbered philosopher’. It’s responses like these that have made the very term ‘philosophical’ a byword for calm, long-term thinking and strength of mind. In short, for perspective.
The wisdom of philosophy is in modern times mostly delivered in the form of books. But, in the past, philosophers sat in market squares and discussed their ideas with shopkeepers or went into government offices and palaces to give advice. It wasn’t abnormal to have a philosopher on your payroll. Philosophy was thought of as a normal, basic activity, rather than as an esoteric, optional extra. Nowadays, it’s not so much that we overtly deny this thought, but we just don’t have the right institutions set up to promulgate wisdom coherently in the world. In the future, though, when the value of philosophy is a little clearer, we can expect to meet more philosophers in daily life. They won’t be locked up, living mainly in university departments, because the points at which our unwisdom bites and messes up our lives are multiple and urgently need attention right now.
Adapted from the website The Philosopher’s Mail. http://thephilosophersmail.com. Access: September, 2018.
Choose the correct alternative:
TEXTO:
While virtually all activity, from yoga to sleeping,
requires energy, studies suggest vigorous exercise is
especially effective at burning calories. Seems obvious,
right? But it’s not just during exercise, it’s for hours after
[5] it’s concluded. And that’s where things get interesting.
The so-called “afterburn effect” is more officially
known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or
simply, EPOC. And it isn’t new in the world of
fitness. Several studies suggest there’s a strong
[10] correlation between the number of calories burned post
exercise and the activity’s intensity. Simply put: The
more intense the exercise, the more oxygen your body
consumes afterward.
In one study conducted with participants who
[15] had metabolic syndrome, EPOC also had significant
positive effects—meaning this type of training could be
especially useful in combating certain health issues,
like obesity and diabetes.
And while one study showed that your afterburn
[20] will increase significantly with duration (i.e. the longer
and more intense your workout, the more you’ll burn),
you don’t necessarily have to work out for a long time
to stimulate the effect.That’s where short, high-intensity
workouts come into play. For example, training protocols
[25] like Tabata, where 20 seconds of all-out effort is followed
by 10 seconds of rest, are one way to trigger the
afterburn; other high-intensity interval workouts
(or HIIT routines) can also get you there. The key with
any of these programs is that you need to be working
[30] hard.
And you don’t need to stick to traditional cardio in
order to achieve an EPOC effect. Several studies have
shown that weight training with various types of
equipment can also elicit elevated EPOC—and may
[35] even be more effective than cardio training in certain
scenarios. But keep in mind: You shouldn’t engage in
this style of training more than about two to three times
per week on non-consecutive days.
TAO, David. Disponível em: https://greatist.com/fitness/afterburneffect-keep-burning-calories-after-workout. Acesso: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.
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Americans are finally eating less
July 24, 2015
Margot Sanger-Katz
After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans’ eating habits have begun changing for the better. Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.
The declines cut across most major demographic groups — including higher- and lower-income families, and blacks and whites — though they vary somewhat by group. In the most striking shift, the amount of full-calorie soda drunk by the average American has dropped 25 percent since the late 1990s. As calorie consumption has declined, obesity rates appear to have stopped rising for adults and school-aged children and have come down for the youngest children, suggesting the calorie reductions are making a difference.
The reversal appears to stem from people’s growing realization that they were harming their health by eating and drinking too much. The awareness began to build in the late 1990s, thanks to a burst of scientific research about the costs of obesity, and to public health campaigns in recent years. The encouraging data does not mean an end to the obesity epidemic: More than a third of American adults are still considered obese, putting them at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Americans are still eating far too few fruits and vegetables and far too much junk food, even if they are eating somewhat less of it, experts say.
But the changes in eating habits suggest that what once seemed an inexorable decline in health may finally be changing course. Since the mid-1970s, when American eating habits began to rapidly change, calorie consumption had been on a near-steady incline. “I think people are hearing the message, and diet is slowly improving,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Barry Popkin, a University of North Carolina professor who has studied food data extensively, described the development as a “turning point.”
There is no perfect way to measure American calorie consumption. But three large sources of data about diet all point in the same direction. Detailed daily food diaries tracked by government researchers, data from food bar codes and estimates of food production all show reductions in the calories consumed by the average American since the early 2000s. Those signals, along with the flattening of the national obesity rate, have convinced many public health researchers that the changes are meaningful.
The eating changes have been the most substantial in households with children. Becky Lopes-Filho’s 4-year-old son, Sebastian, has always been at the top of the growth chart for weight. Ms. Lopes-Filho, 35, is the operations manager of a pizzeria in Cambridge, Mass., and her son, like her, loves food. As he has gotten older, she has grown more concerned about his cravings for sweets. Instead of a cookie every day now, she said, she has been trying to limit him to one a week. “If he was given access, he would just go nuts,” she said. “He, I think, would tend to be a super obese kid.”
(www.nytimes.com. Adaptado.)
De acordo com o texto, é correto afirmar que
Read this sign and answer the question.
By reading the sign, we CANNOT infer that
Rising Temperatures Lead To A Higher
Proportion Of Girls Being Born Than Boys
Rising temperatures in Japan lead to a higher proportion of girls being born than boys, according to a study in Fertility and Sterility. The observation has led the researchers to suggest that climate change could alter the mix of men and women.
Certain species, particularly reptiles, engage in temperature dependent sex selection, in which the sex of offspring is determined by the warmth of the environment in which eggs are incubated. Humans rely on genes, but even for us there are slightly more women conceived in tropical regions than at the poles.
Dr. Misao Fukuda found evidence to support the possibility that human sex ratios may also be influenced by temperature, although in a more subtle way and through a different mechanism.
In 1968, 1.07 boys were born in Japan for every girl. By 2012, that was down to 1.05. A similar shift has been observed in other places, but there is debate about how widespread the trend is, as well as the causes.
Fukuda also looked at data on the ratio of male to female “spontaneous fetal deaths” -- miscarriages after the first twelve weeks of pregnancy over the same period. Here the trend was much steeper, beginning at 1.3 and reaching 2 by the end of the study period.
The fact that female fetuses are more likely to survive is well-known, and there is longstanding evidence that periods of stress affect male fetuses more severely.
Changes to sex ratios for humans are so small that, unlike for reptiles, there is no threat to our survival. Nevertheless, an increase in miscarriages for all fetuses may be one more effect of rapidly changing climates.
Adaptado de: http://www.iflscience.com/environment/fewer-boyschanging-climate Acessado em 18 de outubro de 2014.
It is well known that stress affects males’ fetuses
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