IME 2017 — Questão 39 · Língua Inglesa

PARA AS QUESTÕES 38 a 40 , RESPONDA DE ACORDO COM O TEXTO 3 A SEGUIR.

Texto 3

COULD THIS CATERPILLAR HELP SOLVE THE WORLD’S PLASTIC BAG PROBLEM?

1 A developmental biologist and amateur beekeeper has come up with a new way to get rid

of used plastic bags: Make waxworms eat them. The larvae of the greater wax moth (Galleria

mellonella), these caterpillars thrive on beeswax. While cleaning out empty hive boxes that

were infested with these caterpillars, Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and

5 Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain put them in a plastic grocery bag. To her surprise the

waxworms quickly ate their way out, leaving the bag riddled with holes. It turns out the

caterpillars can break down the bag's polyethylene into ethylene glycol, which can be readily

converted into useful substances such as antifreeze, the team reports today in Current

Biology. Polyethylene is very hard to break down making the 80 million tons produced a year a

10 big recycling challenge. Only recently have researchers begun to make progress doing so,

and this caterpillar may be another solution.

PENNISI, Elizabeth. Adapted from: Science. Could this caterpillar help solve the world’s plastic bag problem? In: Science, 2017. Disponível em: <http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/could-caterpillar-help-solve-world-s-plastic-bagproblem.>. Acesso em: 26/06/2017.

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