Questão 58 - PUC-RS 2° Dia Verão 2010

INSTRUCTION: Answer question with information from text.

 

TEXT

 

The smell of rain on dry ground

 

(...)
More specifically, it’s the pleasant smell that often
accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm,
dry weather in certain regions. Didn’t you always want
a word for it? It was named by two Australian
[5] researchers in an article in Nature in 1964, who
discovered that the smell is an oily essence that comes
from rocks or soil that are often (but not always) clay-

based. The oil is a complicated set of at least fifty
different compounds, rather like a perfume. It turns
[10] out that the oils are given off by vegetation during dry
spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks
and soil particles, to be released into the air again by
the next rains. I can’t find any record of anybody having
tried to bottle and sell it, but can’t help thinking it would
[15] be a hot item (my agent’s fee will be the usual modest
10%). The word comes from Greek petros, a stone,
plus ichor, from the Greek word for the fluid that flows
like blood in the veins of the gods. So the word means
something like “essence of rock”. Alas, it is rarely
[20] encountered.

QUINION, Michael. www.worldwidewords.org (fragment)

The feeling embedded in the word Alas (line 19) is that of