Question

Read this excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath:The driver munched the branded pie and threw the crust away. "Times are changed, don't you know? Thinking about stuff like that don't feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody's kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you'll never get three dollars a day."Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?A.DisgustedB.EnthusiasticC.AmusedD.Sympathetic

Answer 1

Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?

The correct answer is D. Sympathetic

• The word that best describes the tone is sympathetic. When the driver says, “Times are changed, don’t you know?” is looking for a change in the mind of his listener. He is trying to cause a reaction so that the listener makes sense of the reality. In the sentence, “Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids” The driver is asking his listener to do the actions that matter, he is asking the listener not to deviate from the path that is going to take him or her to live day by day. During the complete excerpt, the driver is showing compassion and sensitivity to the listener’s emotions.

Answer 2

The correct answer and the word that best describes the tone of this excerpt from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) is A. Disgusted.

This excerpt belongs to chapter 5 of "The Grapes of Wrath", in which banks and landowners decide to evict farmers from their lands because they cannot make high profits from that farming model. The sentence "times are changed" points to this fact. Tractors arrive to the farmlands to evict the farmers and plow the land, razing the farmhouse if necessary. The farmers protested against it and against the people driving the tractors, usually their own neighbors. The driver is disgusted with the situation because they are also facing problems and cannot think about other families. Their own families are starving and the bank pays three dollars a day for this job, so while they are disgusted, they have to take care of their own kids.