Questões de Inglês - Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension para Concurso

1 IT'S HAPPENED TO me half a dozen times, lately. I'm walking home through the Edinburgh Gardens and I see them heading towards me. Heavy kids, eight of them, maybe ten. I keep walking, but I keep my eyes on them, and my feet wait for the sign to take off.

2 They are Greeks and Italians, all adolescents, all wearing green or maroon cardigans with a double black stripe round the chest, Levis or Wranglers that fit just right, showing a bit of sock and reddish shoes with big heels. I move across to the outside of the footpath to let them pass. They spread out a little. They're close enough now in the almost-dark for me to see their faces.

3 And it's all right, because the front one is Chris, from Fitzroy High, and he says, 'Hello, miss!' and the others are kids who have grinned and nodded at me a hundred times in the yard at school.

4 I had taught migrants before, but Fitzroy High is one of those legendary inner-suburban schools which can no longer be properly described as Australian. In none of the classes I took were there more than four kids with Australian names. A blond head was a surprise. The administration battled to assimilate these kids into recognizable moulds. In a hundred subtle ways they were defeated.

5 Most of the girls had pierced ears and had worn gold earrings since they were babies. The line was that plain gold sleepers were the only ear decorations allowed. At the time when it was fashionable, in Australia, to wear a zillion colored plastic bangles up your arm, teachers strove hopelessly to prevent this display of gaiety at school. The girls went on wearing them and pulled their sleeves down when they saw a senior mistress coming. 

6 There were weekly segregated assemblies. I don't know what they told the boys, but at one girls' assembly I actually heard the senior mistress say, 'As girls we must be modest, quiet, hardworking and well-groomed at all times'.

7 What astonished me was the stubbornness of the kids' resistance to the rules. They didn't organize or protest. They defied. If the pressure got too much for them, they stayed away. And yet they hated to be suspended. One boy was suspended for a week, and every day I'd see him leaning against my front fence, staring wistfully at the school where his mates were tight-roping their way dangerously through the day.

8 In the three other schools I'd taught at, I'd been an authoritarian, a good disciplinarian. It wasn't only political or educational thinking that changed my attitude at Fitzroy High. It was the kids themselves. I suppose I fell in love with the whole nine hundred of them. In other schools, I'd known kids who were 'trouble-makers' or 'over-achievers', or ‘irresponsible' or 'antisocial. But somehow the kids at Fitzroy cut right through those categories.

9 To begin with, they made me laugh. I can't remember ever knowing such exuberant, merry kids. Every class had more than its share of natural clowns. The plays they invented were full of hilarious delight. In a second-form class I had for a year, two Italian boys called Claudio and Joseph used to present weekly plays so excruciatingly funny that we lay across the desks aching and wiping our eyes.

10 A kid called Ilya wrote wonderful, magical stories; he could write fairy tales his grandparents had told him in Yugoslavia. Lemonia could break your heart with a story about a lost fountain pen, and Dora with an account of her dreams. Their English may have been rocky, but there was a pure, delicate humour lying bone-deep in them that nothing could corrupt.

GARNER, Helen. True Stories. Melbourne, Australia: The Publishing Company, 2013, pp. 26-28. Adapted.

    Bermuda Triangle in the last 500 years, over 1000 ships and aircraft have entered the Bermuda Triangle and mysteriously vanished. It is the deadliest place on Earth for planes and boats. The Bermuda Triangle is an area of water about 500,000 square miles in size. One tip of the triangle starts from Miami, Florida and extends northeast towards the island of Bermuda. The next side of the triangle then runs straight south towards the Puerto Rico and then turns back northeast up to Florida. 

    The story of Flight 19 is one of the most incredible cases of Bermuda Triangle disappearances. In the early afternoon of December 5, 1945, five American military aircraft with 14 men aboard departed from a naval base in Florida on a training flight. These aircraft were called Avengers, and they were among the sturdiest and most reliable aircraft in the world at the time. Commander Charles Taylor, an experienced pilot, was supposed to lead the flight east from the Florida coastline, which would take them into the Bermuda Triangle. The sky was clear, and it was a perfect day for flying but problems began about 90 minutes after takeoff.

    Taylor radioed back to his base at 3:40 p.m. that he was lost, and his plane’s compass was not working. This should not have been a problem as the normal procedure for going home was to simply fly west until they returned to the U.S. coast. the men of Flight 19, however, never returned home and the airplanes seemed to have simply vanished. The final radio messages from Flight 19 were very odd. One pilot stated, “Everything looks strange. Even the ocean.” Another one said, “It looks like we’re entering white water. We’re completely lost.” A rescue plane flew into the Bermuda Triangle to try and find the men, but it crashed and all 13 men on board were killed. Later on, a Navy official stated that Flight 19 “flew off to Mars.”

    Flight 19’s disappearance is just one of many in the long history of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Is there a scientific explanation for these disappearances or are there supernatural forces at work in the area? The number of unanswered questions about the fate of the planes only adds to the mystery. Did Taylor, an experienced pilot, really make a simple navigational mistake? If so, why didn’t any of the other men in his flight see the error and correct it? Why has the wreckage of the planes and the men’s bodies never been found after all these years? The US Navy investigated the incident in 1946 and reported that the Flight 19 incident was a “disappearance” with the chilling words “cause unknown” added later on.