Text 10A2

From a distance, Brazil may look like a linguistically homogeneous country. You can easily challenge this false impression if you travel around its huge territory. You will find Spanish in the borders, with most of its neighbors, as well as nearly 200 indigenous languages from the remaining original inhabitants. Over a quarter of a million deaf people use sign language and a small amount of speakers use learned additional languages, English being the most prevalent one.

The monolinguistic ideology that prevailed in social contexts, such as the school, the media, and trading, has been gradually transformed by globalization. New generations commonly listen to music, watch TV, and browse the internet using languages other than Portuguese. English has become more familiar and is easily seen in urban linguistic landscapes. Children and teenagers have access to video games, music videos, and other contemporary forms of entertainment in which English is the main language available. English has become a means to access information that is widely spread online.

Internet: < www.cambridge.org> (adapted).

Text 10A1-II

Sometimes a work of art is so dazzlingly famous that it can blind people to its original context and meaning. That surely is the case with Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

Take the version in London’s National Gallery that the Dutch artist painted in Arles in the South of France in August 1888. Fifteen sunflowers erupt out of a simple earthenware pot against a blazing yellow background. Some of the flowers are fresh and perky, ringed with halos of flickering, flame-like petals. Others are going to seed and have begun to droop.

In part a meditation on the vagaries of time, the picture gives a dynamic, ferociously colourful twist to the long tradition of Dutch flower painting stretching back to the 17th Century. Since it entered the National Gallery’s collection in 1924, it has also proved phenomenally popular. In 2013, more postcards of this painting were sold in the gallery’s shop — the exact figure was 26,110 — than of any other picture in the entire collection.

Internet: <www.bbc.com> (adapted)

Text 10A1-II

Sometimes a work of art is so dazzlingly famous that it can blind people to its original context and meaning. That surely is the case with Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

Take the version in London’s National Gallery that the Dutch artist painted in Arles in the South of France in August 1888. Fifteen sunflowers erupt out of a simple earthenware pot against a blazing yellow background. Some of the flowers are fresh and perky, ringed with halos of flickering, flame-like petals. Others are going to seed and have begun to droop.

In part a meditation on the vagaries of time, the picture gives a dynamic, ferociously colourful twist to the long tradition of Dutch flower painting stretching back to the 17th Century. Since it entered the National Gallery’s collection in 1924, it has also proved phenomenally popular. In 2013, more postcards of this painting were sold in the gallery’s shop — the exact figure was 26,110 — than of any other picture in the entire collection.

Internet: <www.bbc.com> (adapted)

Text 10A1-I

The literary form Eduardo Galeano has created in his many books is unique: descriptive vignettes that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm. Each is self-contained and neatly tells its story not only by what it says, but, equally powerfully, by what it leaves out — and by its juxtaposition, or syncopation, with its neighbors.

Galeano’s book, “Mirrors,” uses this technique to create nothing less than a capsule history of the human race. In some 600 short entries, he travels from prehistory to the present, from the impressionistic to the brutally, precisely documented. Each entry is an avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the prevailing authority was wrong.

The first dozen or so stories move us from the origin of humanity in desire to a meditation on the likelihood that Adam and Eve were black, an evocation of the mystery of the cave paintings in the Sahara, an explanation of the origin of Indian castes and a tribute to the Rosetta stone. Greek mythology figures centrally in the book, as do the flowering of Moorish civilization in Spain, the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted).

Text 10A1-I

The literary form Eduardo Galeano has created in his many books is unique: descriptive vignettes that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm. Each is self-contained and neatly tells its story not only by what it says, but, equally powerfully, by what it leaves out — and by its juxtaposition, or syncopation, with its neighbors.

Galeano’s book, “Mirrors,” uses this technique to create nothing less than a capsule history of the human race. In some 600 short entries, he travels from prehistory to the present, from the impressionistic to the brutally, precisely documented. Each entry is an avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the prevailing authority was wrong.

The first dozen or so stories move us from the origin of humanity in desire to a meditation on the likelihood that Adam and Eve were black, an evocation of the mystery of the cave paintings in the Sahara, an explanation of the origin of Indian castes and a tribute to the Rosetta stone. Greek mythology figures centrally in the book, as do the flowering of Moorish civilization in Spain, the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted).