Read this excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath: After a time perhaps the tenant man looked about—at the pump put in ten years ago, w
ith a goose-neck handle and iron flowers on the spout, at the chopping block where a thousand chickens had been killed, at the hand plow lying in the shed, and the patent crib hanging in the rafters over it. Which rhetorical technique does it best exemplify? A. Understatement
B. Hyperbole
C. Alliteration
D. Parallelism
Letter B is the best answer because there is a high exaggeration for describing the environment, such as by the use of long and detailed words for only one place the tenant man is looking about. The man describes the place by reminding past events and memories, which emphasizes his feelings and thoughts about what he is looking for. Letter A is not possible because it is not a understatement, it is the contrary ideia for that. Letter C is also not possible because there are alliteration in the words chosen, however they differ from each other and gets to produce real alliteration only in some parts of the passage. Then, letter D is also not possible because there is no parallelism in the passage.
