Questão 4 - UFRGS 2º dia 2025

As questão está relacionada ao texto abaixo.

 

    There are as many ways of being blind as there

are of being tall, or sick, or hot. But the popular 
view has always conceived …….. blindness as a

totality. The blind bards wandering the

[5] countrysides of ancient Japan, China, or Europe, 
the blind housed in asylums in the Middle Ages, 
all the pupils in all the schools for the blind from 
the Enlightenment onward, blind beggars and

lawyers, war veterans and toddlers - in the eyes

[10] of history, as well as those of most of their 
contemporaries, they all saw nothing. Modern 
dictionaries still subscribe to this sense: 
blindness is the antonym of vision, and connotes 
a destitution of sight. What else could it mean?

[15]    Despite the poetic impulse to equate blindness

…….. darkness, it's rarely experienced as a black

veil draped over the world. Only around 15 
percent of blind people have no light perception 
whatsoever. Most see something, even if it isn't 
[20] very useful, by sighted standards: a blurry view 
of their periphery, with nothing in the middle, or 
the inverse - the world seen through a 

buttonhole. For some, scenes come through in a 
dim haze; for others, light produces a shower of 
[25] excruciatingly bright needles. Even those with no 
light perception at all have little use for the 
popular image of blindness as darkness: the 
brain cut off from visual stimulus can still 

produce washes of brilliant color and shape. One 
[30] blind man, whose optic nerve - the connection 
between the eyes and the brain - had been 
severed, described seeing a continuously 
swirling (and distracting) "visual tinnitus." The 
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, decades 
[35] …….. his blindness, still saw color, which

sometimes disturbed him: "I, who was 
accustomed to sleeping in total darkness," he 
said, “was bothered for a long time at having to 
sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or 
[40] bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world 
of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness”.

    The arrival or encroachment of blindness gives

rise to a similarly dazzling range of experiences, 
an efflorescence of blind varietals. There are 
[45] those born blind, with no visual memories, 
whose brains – including the visual cortices – 
develop using four (or fewer) senses to construct 
their view of the world. Those who become blind 
in early childhood often retain visual memories 
[50] that can contribute to an intuitive understanding 
of visual concepts. The late-blinded may have 
the most cognitive work to do, forced to relearn 
basic skills like orientation and information – 
gathering through new senses, long after their 

[55] brains' developmental plasticity has hardened. 
Some late-blinded adults consciously struggle to 
preserve their storehouses of mental images, 
like art conservators touching up old and fading 
masterpieces. 

[60]    People are blinded by their spouses or strangers,

by acts of war or sports injuries, by industrial

accidents and bad decisions, malnutrition and

infection, genetic inheritances and spontaneous

mutations. It's disingenuous to argue that

[65] blindness doesn't have a transformative impact

...….. a person's life, but in every case, blindness

is only part of the story. The life of a blind person

is never fully (or even predominantly) defined by

their blindness».

Extraído de: LELAND, A. The Country of the Blind: A memoir at the end of sight. New York: Penguin, 2023.

Assinale a alternativa que apresenta termos que, conforme empregados no texto, operam como membros de uma mesma classe de palavras.