The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted
and could not pick the crop. Which statement best describes the tone of this passage? A. The author repeats words and employs parallelism.
B. The author feels frustrated for the farmers.
C. The author uses the word "creep" to emphasize that debt is sinister.
D. The author uses descriptive words to show what the farmers have done.
The correct answer is: A. The author repeats words and employs parallelism.
Indeed, the sentences are structured in a parallel manner with regards to their components. The first sentence includes the subject (the little farmers=they) plus the verb conjugated in simple past tense (watched) and the rest of the predicate. The second sentence is structured almost exactly in the same manner with the exception that the subject is represented by the personal pronoun “they”. The use of anaphora between the second and third sentence is another typical feature of parallelism.
A non-restrictive modifier add information that does not restrict who the subject can refer to (compare to "The one Marlena that enjoys many subjects" -this one restricts the subject to a specific Marlena). Here it's "who enjoys many different subjects" - it adds additional information about her, but doesn't change the referent.
