Cheese: colocação verbal take hold (C2)

Cheese is spoilage that somebody agreed to supervise. That is the whole of it: milk, which goes bad reliably and fast, is persuaded to go bad in a direction, and the direction is enforced by salt, by temperature and by an inherited set of gestures nobody in the dairy could fully justify. It is the oldest technology of consent between a species and a microbe. Once the mould ___ hold in the paste, the maker's job is no longer to prevent decay but to referee it, deciding which organisms are guests and which are trespassers, on criteria that are ultimately aesthetic. A rind is a border. What lies on either side of it is chemically continuous, and the distinction between the delicacy and the ruined batch is a judgement made by a person standing in a cold room. This ought to unsettle us rather more than it does. We treat food as a domain of fact, safe or unsafe, fresh or spoiled, and here is an entire category built on the deliberate suspension of that binary, taught by hand, defended by law, and wholly dependent on somebody having decided, centuries ago, that this particular rot was worth the risk.

Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).

Assinale a alternativa que completa corretamente a lacuna do texto.

A) gets
B) takes
C) makes
D) catches
E) holds

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Resposta correta: B

Take hold é a colocação consagrada para descrever algo que se instala e começa a se propagar, e funciona sem complemento preposicional obrigatório, como pede a estrutura Once the mould takes hold in the paste. Gets hold e catch hold existem apenas com of e objeto, como em get hold of a rope, sentido concreto de agarrar, incompatível aqui. Makes hold não é combinação aceita no inglês moderno. Holds hold seria uma repetição tautológica sem existência lexical. A escolha depende exclusivamente de colocação estabelecida, já que todos os verbos são formalmente possíveis na posição.

Cheese: colocação verbal take hold (C2)

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