Questões de Concurso

Read the excerpt below of Virginia Woolf’s “A room of one’s own”:

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,--his mother was an heiress--to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid, Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.

Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as

adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than nots he was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? (...) 

According to the narrator: 

Read the excerpt below, in which Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience as a child with Mexican descent in the United States of America:
I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess – that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the comer of the classroom for “talking back” to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.”
(…) At Pan American University, I and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents. Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment.
(…) Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.
Reference: Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. I

In this passage, Anzaldúa

Look at the comic strip below.

Source: https://www.middleweb.com/20394/daily-comic-strip-chronicles-teaching-life/ 

Choose the correct alternative according to the text.

Read the excerpt from the novel by the French writer Édouard Louis:

It’s 12.33 am and I start to write in this dark and silent room. Outside through the open window I hear voices in the night and police sirens in the distance.
I’m 26 years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendency over my life, maybe I’m trapped – I don’t know.
When I was 21 it was already too late, I’d already lived too much – I’d known misery, poverty in my childhood, my mother asking me time and again to go and knock on the neighbours’ or my aunt’s door with an imploring voice so they’d give us a packet of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce because she had no more money and she knew that a child would be more easily pitied than an adult.
I’d known violence, my cousin who died in prison at 30, my older brother who was sick with alcoholism even as a teenager, who woke up drunk most mornings because his body was so steeped in alcohol, my mother who denied it with all her might to protect her son who swore to us every time he drank that it was the last time, that after that he’d never drink again. The fights in the village cafe, the obsessive racism of rural, isolated communities, underlying every sentence, or even every word.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/28/edouard-louischange-book-extract

The narrator in this passage 

While discussing the notion of language functions with their students, a teacher shows them the following sentences:
• Have you considered leaving in the morning instead of now?
• If I were you, I’d think it over before taking action.
• How about giving this decision a second thought?
• It’s a good idea to rest for a while before you go on with the report.
The students are then asked to decide which shared function the four sentences serve, and they will be correct if they choose