Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia

Vicerrectoría Académica y de Investigación

Instituto Virtual de Lenguas – INVIL
Inglés III – 90121

Readings

Reading 4: To-do lists

Scientists have an idea that could help us get to sleep faster. All you need is a pen
and paper. The scientists are from Baylor University in Texas, USA. They did research
into how we can fall asleep more quickly. They found that writing a to-do list helps
people get to sleep faster. Doctor Michael K. Scullin was the lead researcher of the
study. He said to-do lists make us relax because we don't need to worry about the
things we have to do. He said that if we write down the things we need to do, we can
forget about them, so we become calmer. He added: "We live in a 24/7 culture in
which our to-do lists seem to be constantly growing and causing us to worry about
unfinished tasks at bedtime."

The researchers looked at the sleeping patterns of 57 male and female university
students aged between 18 and 30. Half of them had to write down a to-do list five
minutes before they slept. They had to turn the lights out by 10:30pm and could not
have access to technology. The researchers found that the participants who wrote to-
do lists fell asleep an average of 9 minutes faster than those who didn't. They also
found that the students who wrote really detailed lists fell asleep faster than students
who wrote simple, general lists. The USA's National Sleep Foundation said that around
40 per cent of American adults have difficulty falling asleep at least a few times each
month.

Taken from: https://breakingnewsenglish.com/1801/180116-to-do-list.html

 Reading 5

People like to criticize current society. Not necessarily the current society relative to
us, but the contemporary society of the time they live in. It’s just so cool to
romanticize the past even if it makes us feel bad about the present. Past times were
always better. And in this age of information and technology, in which the smartphone
is so ubiquitous, it’s only obvious to blame them for some of society’s problems. Of
course, it’s perfectly reasonable to stop and reflect on the use we give to technology
and to criticize the bad behaviors associated. But I believe that accusing technology
(and, again, especially smartphones) of ruining social interaction and even all kinds of
experiences is, to say the least, quite wrong and misguided. Some people would even
qualify that as pretentious, but I’ll refrain from that.

If you have used the internet in the last years (and I suspect you have), you have
probably seen a picture on your Facebook feed or on your Tumblr dashboard or nearly
everywhere pointing out, with a sense of superiority, how people are slaves of
technology nowadays, always using their electronic devices in public. I’m talking about
illustrations like these. Or comics like these. Or short films like these. Or articles like
these or these. Or photographic projects like these. Again, I could go on. The world
wide web is filled with all kinds of expressive works related to this issue, probably
because it’s something people care about. But I feel that most of that content treats it
using the same premise: smartphones are ruining our lives (at least to some extent).

Retrieved from: Carral, 2015. https://digitalculturist.com/stop-saying-technology-is-causing-social-

isolation-1e004de63a5e
 Reading 6: Are Octopuses smart?

Octopuses, some 300 species of which inhabit tropical waters around the world, can
change colors, squirt out poison, and exert a force greater than their own body
weight. But calling the eight-armed cousin of your garden snail "smart" seems a bit of
a stretch. In fact, the animals are part of an elite group of slimy mollusks known as
cephalopods that range from giant squid to the shelled nautilus and all have
remarkably large "brains"—at least for creatures without backbones. Scientists have
found that octopuses can navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly
and remember those solutions, at least for the short term.
We observed how octopuses figure out how to open clams and what sort of flexibility
and variety they have. We give them clams and mussels in order to figure out which
they like best. They are very strong, but we found they prefer mussels because
mussels are easier to open. They switched to clams when we put the clams on a half
shell. They clearly made a decision to go with what was easiest.Octopuses also have
personalities. We used the same kind of setup people use when they want to study
human personalities. You just ask what do the animals commonly encounter during
the day in different situations and look at the variability. We put them in three
common situations: alerting (opening the top of the tank), threatening (touching the
octopus with a test tube brush) and feeding (the octopus was given a crab to munch).

Taken from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-octopuses-smart/