Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. My father and mother were once again trapped in a police state.
They laid low as best they could. Now that they had four young daughters, they could not take any chances. For a while, that spark which has almost cost my father his life and which he had lighted in my mother seemed to have burnt out. Periodically, Trujillo would demand a tribute, and they would acquiesce. A tax, a dummy vote, a portrait on the wall. To my father and other men in the country, the most humiliating of these tributes was the occasional parade in which women were made to march and turn their heads and acknowledge the great man as they passed the review stand. What is the central idea in this paragraph? Having four young daughters made the family more of a target because of Trujillo’s mandatory tributes. Trujillo required people to take part in tributes and parades, which were enforced by the police state. The author’s parents fought against the dictatorship, even though they participated in the tributes. The author’s parents tried to get by in the dictatorship, but felt humiliated by the tributes they were forced to participate in.
The central idea of the paragraph in this exceprt the author adopts is that her parents barely dealt with the circumstances of living under a dictatorship despite the humiliating tributes done by Trujillo they unwillingly made part of, so the best idea is the last option "<em>The author’s parents tried to get by in the dictatorship, but felt humiliated by the tributes they were forced to participate in."</em> As expressed in the passage, the author's parents tried to keep a low profile to avoid detection from police, but having a handful of daughters made it difficult, and they could not take any risks but to accede to stand the dictatorship.
The three scaffold scenes in The Scarlet Letter are integral to the structure and unity of the narrative. They are the most dramatic scenes at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the novel. Artistically and dramatically, these scenes are at the very core of Hawthorne's tale of crime and punishment.
