Questões de Concurso

Leia o texto a seguir e responda às questões 51, 52 e 53.

Romance and Reality

Military service is demanding and dangerous. As I write this, American soldiers serve in remote and hostile environments. For young leaders in today's Army, the war on terror constitutes a difficult and sometimes tragic reality.

Meanwhile, in the small classrooms of West Point, young cadets consider war through the eyes of Rudyard Kipling, Carl Sandburg, and John McCrae. During his or her plebe year, every West Point cadet takes a semester of English literature, reading and discussing poetry from Ovid to Owen, Spenser to Springsteen. Cadets must also recite poems from memory, a challenge that many graduates recall years later as one of their toughest hurdles.

Why, in an age of increasingly technical and complex warfare, would America's future combat leaders spend sixteen weeks studying the likes of irony, rhyme, and meter?

Poetry confronts cadets with new ideas that challenge their worldview. The West Point curriculum includes poetry, history, philosophy, politics, and law, because these subjects provide a universe of new ideas, different perspectives, competing values and conflicting emotions. In combat, our graduates face similar challenges: whether to fire at a sniper hiding in a mosque, or how to negotiate agreements between competing tribal leaders. Schoolbook solutions to these problems do not exist; combat leaders must rely on their own morality, their own creativity, their own convictions. In teaching cadets poetry, we teach them not what to think, but how to think.

Adapted from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=romance+and+reality.