This question is missing the options. I've found the complete question online. It is the following:
Lourdes hadn’t bothered to study for the essay exam, joking that her motto was "fake it ‘til you make it." Now, as she stared in horror at the test booklet, the blank pages were doing the laughing, knowing she had no answers. What kind of figurative language is used?
a. personification
b. simile
c. metaphor
d. hyperbole
Answer:
The kind of figurative language being used is:
a. personification
Explanation:
<u>Personification is a common figure of speech in literary works. Personification happens when an author gives living qualities to non-living things.</u> For instance, if the speaker of a poem says that the wind and the leaves are dancing during fall, he is using personification. Wind and leaves are not humans; they do not dance. However, by saying so, the speaker makes the movements of the leaves being carried by the wind more artistic, more vivid even.
<u>The same happens when the author of the passage we are analyzing says, "the blank pages were doing the laughing, knowing she had no answers." Blank pages are not beings, much less conscious beings. They cannot know anything or laugh at all. But, by phrasing it this way, the author makes it seem that Lourdes is being mocked, that her fate is quite an ironic one.</u>