I strongly believe that time spent learning a trade for career development is as valuable as the time invested in a college degree.
I think that the most important thing is the time invested in your dreams, it doesn't matter if it is a college degree or a trade, nor if one takes longer than the other or if one of them will get you more money. Time spent in something you don't like to do, eventually, will be a waste because you will not be happy doing that job and will probably quit sooner or later.
Whether you pick one thing or the other, you must really love it, you have to be passionate about it and, if you do this, it'll be never a waste of time.
The business like tone of this passage shows that the narrator is low on moral grounds and does not believe in humanity. The reader might believe that the narrator is out of his senses for meaningful business activity. The reader might also tend to believe that he is insane without any kind of logic or commonsense.
Assuming the options are crowded out, rich flora, plunge pool, or flowing stream, the answer would be <u>crowded out</u>. This implies that there isn't enough room for something, a negative idea, whereas the others describe nature.
