• Nível C2
• Interpretação de texto
• Instituicao e modos de ver
• artigo de opiniao

Eleven Words on a Brass Plate: o zoológico como pedagogia do olhar (C2)

The animals are the pretext. What the institution actually exhibits is a way of looking, and it exhibits it to children, at an age when ways of looking are still being installed. The lesson is delivered by the architecture before a single creature is seen: there is a path, and the path has a direction, and along it the world's fauna has been arranged in an order that occurs nowhere on earth, each species reduced to one representative example, each example available at a convenient height. Nothing is asked of the visitor except passage. The disappointment that follows is therefore structural and not the fault of the collection. One arrives before the enclosure expecting an encounter, and receives instead an object that will not perform; the animal declines the transaction, sleeps, or paces a diagonal it has worn into the concrete, and the child, sensing that something has failed, asks to move on. The zoo's defenders speak of conservation and are largely right, which is inconvenient for the argument and must be conceded. But conservation would not require a path, or a gift shop at the exit, or the small brass plate that tells you, in eleven words, everything you are expected to feel.

Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).

A concessão feita pelo autor aos defensores do zoológico cumpre a função de

1. A A) atenuar o tom acusatório do texto, indicando que o autor considera insuficientes as evidências reunidas contra a instituição que analisa.
2. B B) revelar uma contradição insuperável no raciocínio, já que a conservação das espécies justificaria por si só toda a estrutura descrita.
3. C C) deslocar a responsabilidade pelo fracasso da visita dos administradores do zoológico para o público infantil, incapaz de atenção prolongada.
4. D D) sugerir que a disputa entre críticos e defensores dos zoológicos é irresolúvel, cabendo a cada visitante formar sua própria opinião.
5. E E) reconhecer a validade do argumento conservacionista e, em seguida, isolá-lo daquilo que se critica — o percurso, a loja e a placa —, o que reforça a tese sobre a encenação do olhar.