The moon: condicional invertida com were (C2)

Every calendar we have ever kept is a negotiation with a rock that is slowly leaving. The moon recedes by a few centimetres a year, which is nothing in a human life and everything across the span in which tides carved estuaries and organisms learned to time their spawning to a light in the sky. ___ the moon appreciably nearer, the tides would rise into the towns whose clocks were set by them, the day itself would be shorter, and the whole apparatus of hours we mistake for a natural fact would have to be renegotiated from the beginning. This is the quiet scandal of the object: it looks like permanence and behaves like a process. We have used it as the standard image of the unchanging, the same moon Sappho saw, as if sameness were the point, while it has been steadily draining momentum out of the planet's spin and lengthening our afternoons by fractions no ancestor could ever have felt. Nothing in the sky was ever a fixed point. There were only things moving slowly enough that a short-lived and self-important species could mistake their patience for eternity, and then build a mythology on the error.

Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).

Assinale a alternativa que completa corretamente a lacuna do texto.

A) Was
B) Had
C) Would
D) Should
E) Were

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Resposta correta: E

Trata-se de uma condicional irreal do presente sem if, formada pela inversão do subjuntivo were com o sujeito: Were the moon nearer equivale a If the moon were nearer, e a oração principal com would rise confirma a leitura hipotética. Was nunca sofre essa inversão, que é reservada à forma de subjuntivo. Had exigiria particípio, como em Had the moon been nearer, e aqui não há been. Would e Should não podem ser seguidos diretamente por um sintagma adjetivo sem verbo, o que torna as duas opções agramaticais.

The moon: condicional invertida com were (C2)

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