The desire for knowledge is considered positive.
Avidity is a notion that has its origins in avid . This adjective (avid), from the Latin word avĭdus , qualifies someone who is ambitious or who is desirous of something .
For example: “I always had a desire to know other countries,” “The desire for wealth can be healthy, but you don't have to be greedy,” “Despite the fact that the team was already winning four to zero, the Uruguayan striker continued to show his desire.” .
It can be said that greed is the desire that a person has to obtain something. If we refer to the first example that we mentioned above, greed is the desire that the subject in question has to visit different nations. In the second example, greed is associated with the desire for money , which can function as an incentive to work hard and, in turn, lead to conduct that is condemnable from a moral point of view. Finally, the third example is linked to the appetite of a footballer who wants to continue scoring goals even after his team's victory has already been defined.
Characteristics of greed
Being greedy is not positive or negative in itself : it is a circumstance or a state that can be used to develop different kinds of actions .
The hunger for knowledge can make a person read a lot, take workshops or pursue a career. In this case, greed is very valuable. On the other hand, if the desire to have a lot of money leads a person to steal or get involved in illicit businesses, it can be argued that his greed was negative for him and his environment.
Reading is one of the activities that is usually linked to avidity, when there is a great passion that does not allow the subject to detach themselves from their favorite books. In this context it is possible to speak of an avid reader and it should not be confused with someone who simply enjoys reading, but rather someone who cannot live without it.
There are people who are eager to travel.
The concept in medicine
In the field of medicine , this term also has a meaning, more precisely when talking about toxoplasmosis , an infection that originates from the endocellular parasitic protozoan known as Toxoplasma gondii . The clinical manifestations of this infection present a great variety and one of the values that doctors must determine to make an adequate diagnosis is the avidity of the antibody ; that is, the strength of its binding with multivalent epitopes, which can last several years.
Measuring the avidity of the antibody is especially useful and for this there is the so-called avidity test . The initial response to infection is carried out with an antibody of very low avidity, and this results in easy dissociation of antigen binding. On the other hand, a high index serves to rule out a toxoplasmosis infection that has occurred in the last four months.
From a medical point of view, the procedure of this test does not present marked complexity. Broadly speaking, it is an analysis during which the patient's serum is diluted and subjected to duplicate processing in parallel, to obtain two readings that allow the calculation of the avidity index: one with dissociant and the other with diluent. . This index must be multiplied by 100 to finally classify the result into one of the three possible bands: high avidity (greater than 30%), medium avidity (between 20 and 30%) and low avidity (less than 20%).
Greed for water
Without moving away from science, we can find another use of this term that is not common in everyday speech.
In this case, it can be said that sulfuric acid has a marked avidity for water , and that for this reason it is used for drying gases.