Questão 17 - Português e Inglês - ITA 2002

As questões de 15 a 18 referem-se ao texto abaixo:

THE GREAT ENGLISH DIVIDE

     Antonio Sanz might as well have won the lottery. In 1965, when the small, curlyhaired Spaniard was 10, an American professor asked his parents if she might take the boy to the U.S. and enroll him in public school. They agreed. America seemed to offer a brighter future than the dairy farms where his father worked in the foothills north of Madrid. Sanz left, but came back to Spain every summer with stories from Philadelphia and boxes of New World artifacts: Super Balls, baseball cards, and Bob Dylan records.

     His real prize, though, was English. Sanz learned fast, and by senior year he outscored most of his honors English classmates in the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In those days, back in his hometown of Colmenar Viejo, English seemed so exotic that kids would stop him on the street and ask him to say a few sentences. By the time he graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, N. Y., and moved back to Spain, American companies there were nearly as excited. He landed in Procter & Gamble Co.

     Sanz, now 46 and a father of three, employs his Philadelphia English as an executive at Vodafone PLC in Madrid. But something funny has happened to his second language. These days, English is no longer special, or odd, or even foreign. In Paris, Düsseldorf, Madrid, and even in the streets of Colmenar Viejo, English has put down roots. “What else can we speak?” Sanz asks. (…)

Business Week Aug 13, 2001.

A frase que melhor expressa a idéia principal do texto é: