Bats: subjuntivo formal depois de lest (C2)
The eighteenth-century naturalists who first crawled into church roofs wrote in a register we have lost, and their caution reads now like piety. Move slowly through the loft, one of them advises, and keep the lantern low, lest a single careless beam ___ the colony into premature waking and cost the young the fat they will need in January. The advice is sound and the grammar is antique, and both are worth preserving. Bats have suffered more than most animals from our habit of assigning species to categories of feeling. They are neither the vermin of the sanitary pamphlet nor the gothic messengers of the illustrated novel; they are mammals with an expensive metabolism and an extremely narrow margin. A disturbed hibernaculum is not merely startled. It is impoverished. Each unscheduled arousal burns days of stored energy that cannot be replaced until the insects return, which is why a winter of curiosity can empty a roof more thoroughly than a winter of cold. What the old naturalist understood, without the physiology to explain it, was that our attention is not free. Even looking has a price, and something small and hanging in the dark is the one paying it.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
Assinale a alternativa que completa corretamente a lacuna do texto.
- A) startles
- B) startled
- C) startle
- D) will startle
- E) would startle