Questões de Concurso – Aprova Concursos

Text 1A2-I

 Languages are more to us than systems of thought

transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves
about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic
expression. When the expression is of unusual significance, we
call it literature. Art is so personal an expression that we do not
like to feel that it is bound to predetermined form of any sort.
The possibilities of individual expression are infinite, language in
particular is the most fluid of mediums. Yet some limitation there
must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium.
 In great art there is the illusion of absolute freedom. The
formal restraints imposed by the material are not perceived; it is
as though there were a limitless margin of elbow room between
the artist’s fullest utilization of form and the most that the
material is innately capable of. The artist has intuitively
surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material, made its
brute nature fuse easily with his conception. The material
“disappears” precisely because there is nothing in the artist’s
conception to indicate that any other material exists. For the time
being, he, and we with him, move in the artistic medium as a fish
moves in the water, oblivious of the existence of an alien
atmosphere. No sooner, however, does the artist transgress the
law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a
medium to obey.
 Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze
or clay are the materials of the sculptor. Since every language has
its distinctive peculiarities, the innate formal limitations—and
possibilities—of one literature are never quite the same as those
of another. The literature fashioned out of the form and substance
of a language has the color and the texture of its matrix. The
literary artist may never be conscious of just how he is hindered
or helped or otherwise guided by the matrix, but when it is a
question of translating his work into another language, the nature
of the original matrix manifests itself at once. All his effects have
been calculated, or intuitively felt, with reference to the formal
“genius” of his own language; they cannot be carried over
without loss or modification. Croce is therefore perfectly right in
saying that a work of literary art can never be translated.
Nevertheless, literature does get itself translated, sometimes with
astonishing adequacy.

Edward Sapir. Language: an introduction to the study of speech. 1921 (adapted).

Text 1A2-II

 I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper
might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who
could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of
his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why
such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a
loss to say—but, perhaps, the authorial vanity has had more to do
with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers—poets
in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a
species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the
scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at
the true purposes seized only at the last moment—at the
innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of
full view—at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as
unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the
painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and
pinions—the tackle for scene-shifting—the step-ladders, and
demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black
patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute
the properties of the literary histrio.
 I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no
means common, in which an author is at all in condition to
retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained. In
general, suggestions, having arisen pell-mell are pursued and
forgotten in a similar manner.
 For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the
repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in
recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my
compositions, and, since the interest of an analysis or
reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite
independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed,
it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to
show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works
was put together. I select The Raven as most generally known. It
is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its
composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the
work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision
and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

Edgar Allan Poe. The Philosophy of Composition, 1846 (adapted)

Text 1A2-III

 In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his
life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty
years. He had inspired two generations of Indian patriots, shaken
an empire and sparked off a revolution which was to change the
face of Africa and Asia. To millions of his own people, he was
the Mahatma — the great soul — whose sacred glimpse was a
reward in itself.
 By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the
suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he had to face, when he
first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and
imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and
utopian, had begun to strike answering chords in some of the
finest minds in the world. “Generations to come, it may be,”
Einstein had said of Gandhi in July 1944, “will scarcely believe
that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon
earth.”
 Though his life had been a continual unfolding of an
endless drama, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men.
It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings of
political eminence or with less of the popular image of a heroic
figure. With his loin cloth, steel-rimmed glasses, rough sandals, a
toothless smile and a voice which rarely rose above a whisper, he
had a disarming humility. He was, if one were to use the famous
words of the Buddha, a man who had “by rousing himself, by
earnestness, by restraint and control, made for himself an island
which no flood could overwhelm.”
 Gandhi’s deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did
not — as had been the custom in his country — retire to a cave in
the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within
him. He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human
activity; the spiritual law did not work in a vacuum, but
expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life.
 This aspiration to relate the spirit of religion to the
problems of everyday life runs like a thread through Gandhi’s
career: his uneventful childhood, the slow unfolding and the
near-failure of his youth, the reluctant plunge into the politics of
Natal, the long unequal struggle in South Africa, and the
vicissitudes of the Indian struggle for freedom, which under his
leadership was to culminate in a triumph not untinged with
tragedy.

B. R. Nanda. Gandhi: a pictorial biography, 1972 (adapted)

A QUÍMICA DA FELICIDADE 

Você é feliz? E agora, neste exato momento, você está feliz? Esperamos que sim. Mas, seja qual for o seu 
veredicto, você provavelmente hesitou um pouquinho antes de responder. 
Porque a felicidade é fugidia: às vezes conseguimos agarrá-la, e queremos ficar assim para sempre, mas aí 
ela começa a escorrer como areia por entre os dedos - ou simplesmente some, sem motivo aparente, para 
reaparecer tempos depois. 
Como escreveu Machado de Assis, a felicidade é uma quimera: algo que você passa a vida tentando alcançar, 
mas está sempre escapando. Ela é muito mais do que ter saúde, dinheiro, liberdade e uma rede de apoio 
social - os critério's usados pelo World Happiness Report, da ONU, para medir o grau de felicidade de uma 
nação. 
Na décima edição desse ranking, publicado, em 2022, o Brasil aparece apenas na 38ª posição; e os países 
mais felizes do mundo são, pela ordem, Finlândia, Dinamarca e Islândia. A Finlândia, aliás, lidera o ranking 
há cinco anos. Só que 18,8% da sua população tem algum problema psicológico, especialmente depressão 
- o percentual mais alto da União Europeia. 
Cada vez mais gente tenta resolver o problema recorrendo aos antidepressivos, mas isso desencadeou um 
fenômeno curioso: ao mesmo tempo em que aumenta o uso desses medicamentos, a porcentagem de 
deprimidos na sociedade segue crescendo. 
No ano passado, um trabalho publicado por cientistas ingleses jogou lenha na fogueira. Eles revisaram os 
dados de 17 grandes estudos, que somados avaliam mais de 100 mil pessoas, e chegaram a uma conclusão 
bombástica: não existe relação entre a depressão e baixos níveis de serotonina no cérebro - o que a maior 
parte dos antidepressivos trata. 
A notícia correu o mundo, com uma onda de manchetes dizendo que essas drogas não funcionam, e seu 
efeito é mero placebo. Não é bem assim. Todos os antidepressivos que estão no mercado foram submetidos 
a testes e passaram. 
O mais prováv~I é que a felicidade e a infelicidade estejam relacionadas a mecanismos cerebrais mais 
complexos do que se imagina. 

                                                                                                Compilado e adaptado. Brono Garattoni e Tiago Cordeiro. Disponível em 
                                                                            {hllps:l/super. abril. com. brlcienciala-quimica-da-felicidade/], consultado em 7.2.2023.