Questões de Inglês - Substantivos contáveis e incontáveis | Countable and uncountable para Concurso

What life in medieval Europe was really like

      A time of innovation, philosophy, and legendary works of art: the realities of the medieval period (500 to 1500 C.E.) in Europe may surprise you. Many know the years before the Renaissance and _________________ that followed as Europe’s “Dark Ages,” a time of backward, slovenly, and brutal people who were technologically primitive and hopelessly superstitious.

     Sure, it would take until the 19th century for the germ theory of disease to overtake the concept of humors and “miasmas” that could damage human health. But the ___________ image of medieval people as slovenly, unwashed, and lacking hygiene is false. In fact, both indoor and outdoor bathing were beloved in Europe. People not only made and used soap at home, but they frequented bathhouses—some public, some private, some merely fronts for brothels.

      A myth persists that during the Middle Ages, the unenlightened believed Earth was flat and worried that ships might even fall off the planet’s edge. That’s patently false: People knew the planet was a sphere as far back as ancient Greece (12th to 9th centuries B.C.), and had relatively complex astronomical and planetary ______________ by the time Christopher Columbus made his voyage to the Americas in 1492.

      The so-called “Dark Ages” is a myth historians have spent years trying to disprove. The myth seems to stem from some authors’ use of “dark” to refer to everything from a 14th-century poet’s complaints about the quality of local literature to a 17th-century historian’s failed attempt to find historical sources from centuries earlier.

(Fonte: National Geographic — adaptado.)

Read the excerpt of the chapter “Decolonization” from the book Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts below to answer QUESTION.

“Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is achieved. Initially, in many places in the colonized world, the process of resistance was conducted in terms or institutions appropriated from the colonizing culture itself. This was only to be expected, since early nationalists had been educated to perceive themselves as potential heirs to European political systems and models of culture. This occurred not only in settler colonies where the white colonial élite was a direct product of the system, but even in colonies of occupation. Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education had proposed the deliberate creation in India of just such a class of ‘brown white men’, educated to value European culture above their own. This is the locus classicus of this hegemonic process of control, but there are numerous other examples in the practices of other colonies. […]

As well as direct and indirect economic control, the continuing influence of Eurocentric cultural models privileged the imported over the indigenous: colonial languages over local languages; writing over orality and linguistic culture over inscriptive cultures of other kinds (dance, graphic arts, which had often been designated ‘folk culture’). Against all these occlusions and overwritings of pre-colonial cultural practices, a number of programmes of decolonization have been attempted. Notable among these have been those that seek to revive and revalue local languages. The pressure of the global economy means that élite communication is dominated by the use of the ex-colonial languages, notably the new ‘world language’ of English, whose power derives from its historical use across the largest of the modern empires and from its use by the United States.” (ASHCROFT, et al., 2007, p. 56-57)