Answer:
1. The children were doing their homework when their father came back from the office.
2. He was playing the guitar when someone opened the window and threw out a bucket of water.
Johnson uses sarcasm in this poem as he expresses the opposite of what he means. When he says "pile on the Black Man's Burden", and gives examples of how people can make black men more miserable than they already are ("his wail with laughter drown"), he is using sarcasm. He clearly does not want people to pile on this burden and make black men's lives harder, but he is saying that people should do it to show them how ridiculous it sounds and to point out that people are already doing that.
A direct object is a word or words, usually in a form of nouns, that receives the action of the verb in the sentence. In the given sentence above, the direct object is the word "game". The correct answer is option C. The direct object "game" receives the action of the transitive verb "play".
