Whales: partícula idiomática em hunt out of existence (C2)
There is no comfortable way to think about a whale. The scale defeats the ordinary machinery of sympathy: an animal whose heart a person could crawl through, whose calls cross an entire basin, whose life may run to two centuries and may therefore have begun before the industry that hunted it had even been invented. We have no category for that. So we reach for the categories we do have, and the whale becomes a symbol, of the ocean, of what we have damaged, of a scale of being that rebukes us, and the symbol is now so heavy that the animal underneath it can barely be seen at all. This is not a small loss. A symbol cannot surprise you. The actual creatures are stranger than any of the uses we have put them to: cultures of song that change annually across an entire ocean and are then abandoned, feeding techniques transmitted between individuals who are not related, the long unaccountable business of a body that size moving that quietly. We hunted them nearly ___ of existence and then, having stopped, hung them from museum ceilings and called the debt settled. It is not settled.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
Assinale a alternativa que completa corretamente a lacuna do texto.
- A) off
- B) clear
- C) out
- D) free
- E) away