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Appendix 4

Week 5
Pre-reading

1) Would you prefer to drink a cup of tea or coffee?

2) How often do you drink?
3) Are you addicted to coffee or tea?
Advantages and Disadvantages of Coffee

Caffeine, the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world, is the best known
ingredient of coffee. Its beneficial effects on the human body have been researched quite well,
but coffee as a whole is a complex beverage with a thousand different substances. Some studies
argue that decaf and caffeinated coffee may have the same health effects and suggest that it’s
not the caffeine that is responsible for most of coffee's health benefits.

Research on coffee and it's pros and cons for humans is nowhere near finished, but here is a
list of what we know at the moment.

Firstly, Caffeine’s main effect on the body is to increase alertness and arousal, which
can make workouts seem not so bad. It also may help the muscles burn more fat. Here’s
the theory: Muscles use glycogen, a stored version of glucose, for energy, and when
glycogen stores run out, muscles get weaker and less efficient, leading to exhaustion.
Besides, it’s also unclear how much coffee you need to get the exercise benefits. Until
recently, the thinking has been that since the body can become tolerant to caffeine,
regular coffee drinkers would need an extra cup to get the exercise benefits. But in a
recent study conducted by researchers in Brazil, even regular caffeine drinkers —
including those who downed about three cups of coffee every day—were able to pedal
faster and longer on a stationary bike after taking a caffeine pill, which contained the
caffeine equivalent of four cups of coffee, compared to when they hadn’t taken the
pill.
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Secondly, a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that older
people with low levels of inflammation had something surprising in common: they
were all caffeine drinkers. “The more caffeine people consumed, the more protected
they were against a chronic state of inflammation,” says study author David Furman,
consulting associate professor at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and
Infection at Stanford University. “There was no boundary, apparently.”

In the study, Furman and his colleagues analysed blood samples from 100 young and
old people. The older people tended to have more activity in several inflammation -
related genes compared with the younger group — no surprise, since as people get
older, inflammation throughout the body tends to rise. Chronic diseases of aging,
like diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, cancer, joint disorders and Alzheimer’s,
are all believed to have inflammation in common. “Most of the diseases of aging are
not really diseases of aging, per se, but rather diseases of inflammation,” Furman says.
The more active these genes were, the more likely the person was to have high blood
pressure and atherosclerosis.

Thirdly, many people use different tricks and techniques to keep their eyeballs from losing
focus and drifting off to sleep. One such technique to stay awake is to drink coffee. Drinking
hot beverages is very common for students while cramming in their final studying on the eve
of exams. Somehow, drinking coffee or tea (caffeine-rich beverages) helps you stay awake.
Have you ever wondered why? Caffeine enters this picture when you drink coffee, tea, or some
other caffeine-fueled beverage. Caffeine is a very smart substance, as it binds to the adenosine
receptors in the brain, essentially blocking the molecules that cause slowing down brain
activity.
This is very similar to the idea of ‘two negatives make a positive.’ Adenosine slows the
activities of the brain, but caffeine binds to adenosine molecules and slows down their activity.
This is why the activities of brain go unchecked and you are able to fend off feelings of
drowsiness.

Disadvanteges of drinking coffee

Activity 1

Central claims:
1) What is the purpose of the text or the author?
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Context:
2) What audience is the text written for?
Kinds of reasoning.
3) What concepts are defined and used?
4) Does the text appeal to a theory or theories?
5) Is any specific methodology laid out?
6) If there is an appeal to a particular concept, theory, or method, how is that
concept, theory, or method then used to organize and interpret the data?
7) You might also examine how the text is organized: how has the author analysed
(broken down) the material?
Evidence:
8) What counts as evidence in this argument?
9) Is the evidence statistical? literary? historical? etc.
10) From what sources is the evidence taken?
Post-reading
Activity 2
Evaluation:
11) If the argument is strong/weak, why?
12) Could it be better or differently supported?
13) Are there gaps, leaps, or inconsistencies in the argument?
14) Could the evidence be interpreted differently?
15) Are the conclusions warranted by the evidence presented?

Disadvantages of
drinking coffee
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A) Please complete the essay by adding the disadvantages sides of drinking coffee
supporting your evidence with research, anecdotes or statistics and by writing a
conclusion.