What is a friend?

Márcio Paulo Barbosa Pena Mascarenhas

Laurie: To me, a friend is someone who stands by you when you need them, someone who cares. Not like your parents, though. Parents are either picking on you or telling you off, so sometimes it’s a pain. To a friend you can always open up.

Angela: I agree with Laurie but personally, I don’t think a friend has to be physically around all the time. I have friends that I haven’t seen in years, but I know if we get together, we’ll pick up right where we left off.

Fran: I think a friend is that old pal you’ve always gotten on with. I often look back on my schooldays and I think of the funny things my friends and I did together. As I see it, the friends you make in youth are friends to keep for a lifetime.

Gary: If you ask me, a friend is a person you have fun and relax with. My friends and I talk about movies, sports or politics. I don’t go round telling them my troubles and I don’t particularly want to hear theirs. I believe that if you don’t expect too much from people, you won’t be let down.

Grade 1, Student’s book, Belo Horizonte, 14th edition.

Read the text and answer the question below.

An explosion at Yellowstone National Park

A hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park surprised visitors and caused them to run for safety as steam, rock, and dirt shot into the sky.

The explosion was possibly due to minerals clogging an underground pipe. No injuries were reported, but the explosion damaged a boardwalk in the Biscuit Basin Area. Videos of the event show water and debris raining down over the park. Hydrothermal explosions are somewhat common in Yellowstone. They occur when underground water turns to steam. Similar eruptions happened in the Biscuit Basin in 1959, 1991, and 2009. Predicting these events is difficult as they can happen instantaneously. The Park Service will investigate if the explosion altered the underground system by measuring the chemical makeup and temperature of nearby geysers and vents. Despite the explosion, no changes in the volcanic system have been detected, and the park remains at normal activity levels.

http://www.newsinlevels.com/products/an-explosion-at-yellowstone-nationalpark- level-3/.

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TEXT II

TITLE: Asteroid probe snaps rare images of Martian Moon

March 13,2025 3:29 PM

By Agence France-Press

Paris -

On the way to investigate the scene of a historic asteroid collision, a European spacecraft swung by Mars and captured rare images of the red planet's mysterious small moon Deimos, the European Space Agency said Thursday.

Europe's HERA mission is aiming to find out how much of an impact a NASA spacecraft made when it deliberately smashed into an asteroid in 2022 in the first test of our planetary defenses.

But HERA will not reach the asteroid - which is 11 million kilometers from Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - until late 2026.

On the long voyage there, the spacecraft swung around Mars on Wednesday.

The spacecraft used the planet's gravity to get a “kick” that also changed its direction and saved fuel, mission analyst Pablo Munoz told a press conference.

For an hour, HERA flew as close as 5,600 kilometers from the Martian surface, at a speed of 33,480 kilometers an hour.

It used the opportunity to test some of its scientific instruments, snapping around 600 pictures, including rare ones of Deimos.

The lumpy, 12.5-kilometer-wide moon is the smaller and less well-known of the two moons of Mars.

Exactly how Deimos and the bigger Phobos were formed remains a matter of debate.

Some scientists believe they were once asteroids that were captured in the gravity of Mars, while others think they could have been shot from a massive impact on the surface.

The new images add “another piece of the puzzle” to efforts to determine their origin, Marcel Popescu of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy said.

There are hopes that data from HERA's "HyperScout" and thermal infrared imagers - which observe colors beyond the limits of the human eye - will shed light on this mystery by discovering more about the moon's composition.

Those infrared imagers are why the red planet appears blue in some of the photos.

Next, HERA will turn its focus back to asteroid Dimorphos. When NASA's DART mission smashed into Dimorphos in 2022, it shortened the 160-meter-wide asteroid's orbit around its big brother Didymos by 33 minutes.

Although Dimorphos itself posed no threat to Earth, HERA intends to discover whether this technique could be an effective way for Earth to defend itself against possibly existence-threatening asteroids in the future.

Space agencies have been working to ramp up Earth's planetary defences, monitoring for potential threats so they can be dealt with as soon as possible.

Earlier this year, a newly discovered asteroid capable of destroying a city was briefly given a more than 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.

However further observations sent the chances of a direct hit back down to nearly zero.

Richard Moissl, head of the ESA's planetary defense office, said that asteroid, 2024 YR, followed a pattern that will become more common.

As we get better at scanning the skies, “we will discover asteroids at a higher rate," he said.

The ESA is developing a secondary planetary defense mission to observe the 350-meter-wide asteroid Apophis, which will fly just 32,000 kilometers from Earth on April 13, 2029.

If approved by the ESA's ministerial council, the Ramses mission will launch in 2028, reaching the asteroid two months before it approaches Earth.

(Adapted from: https://www.voanews.com/a/asteroid-probe- snaps-rare-images-of-martian-moor/8009850.html)

Text 7A2-II

In October 1971, a gentleman called Frieder Nake published a note entitled, There Should Be No Computer Art, which I quote here. “Soon after the advent of computers, it became clear that there was a great potential application for them in the area of artistic creation”, he began. “Before 1960, amazing, large, expensive, digital computers helped to produce poetic text and music. Analog computers, or only oscilloscopes, generated drawings of sets of mathematical curves and representations of oscillations. It was not before the first exhibitions of computer produced pictures were held in 1965 that a greater public took notice of this threat, as some said, progress, as some thought. I was involved in this development from its beginning.

I think that the way the art scene reacted to the new creations is interesting, pleasing, and stupid. I stated in 1970 that I was no longer going to take part in exhibitions. I find it easy to admit that computer art did not contribute to the advancement of art if we compare the computer products to all existing works of art. In other words, the repertoire of results of aesthetic behavior has not been changed by the use of computers. This point of view, namely, that of art history, is shared and held against computer art by many art critics. There is no doubt in my mind”, Frieder Nake said, “that interesting new methods have been found in the last decade which can be of some significance for the creative artist”.

As you might imagine, this was a bit of a controversial take. Here was a man who had for part of the previous decade been an insider, an advocate for the use of algorithmic and generative processes to create art. However, he was now seeing things from another perspective. I’ll just finish with another piece from what he posted in that article: “Questions like ‘is a computer creative’, or ‘is a computer an artist’, or the like, should not be considered serious questions, period. In the light of what we are facing at the end of the 20th century, those irrelevant questions do not matter”.

Where is the Art? A History in Technology.

Internet: <https://www.infoq.com> (adapted).