Portuguese Language for the Delegado Exam
What the exam tests
Portuguese questions for police delegates test text interpretation and grammar in use, not literary knowledge. You must identify the thesis and arguments of a text, distinguish fact from opinion, and detect presuppositions and implicit meanings. On the normative side, master regência (verbal and nominal government), concordância (verbal and nominal), crase, pronoun placement (próclise, mesóclise, ênclise), and punctuation, especially the comma and its role in separating appositive and explanatory clauses.
Traps that appear
- Ambiguity questions: a pronoun like seu or sua may refer to two antecedents; the answer is often the reading the text does not disambiguate.
- Crase before place names: use a before feminine places that admit the article (Vou à Bahia), but not before those that reject it (Vou a Brasília). Test with volto da/do.
- Concordância with haver and existir: havia is impersonal and singular; existiam agrees with its subject.
- Comma before e: correct only when the subjects differ or the clause is explanatory.
- Inference vs. presupposition: questions ask what is inferred, not what is literally stated; do not import outside knowledge.
Rule of thumb
For interpretation items, locate the anchor sentence in the text that supports each alternative, then eliminate options that go beyond it. For grammar, substitute a masculine noun to test crase and reorder the sentence to test pronoun placement.
Worked example
“A polícia informou aos jornalistas que o inquérito fora concluído.” The verb informar is transitive-direct and indirect; aos jornalistas is the indirect object, and que o inquérito fora concluído is the direct object clause. A distractor offering informou os jornalistas de que... changes the government and is wrong. Rule: memorize the government of verbs like informar, avisar, assistir, aspirar, visar, preferir.