You never showed the question for the answer.
Answer:
it helps describe the setting of the passage
Answer:
The speaker wants to indicate readers the important thing is how they can understand the poem.
Explanation:
A Contribution to Statistics is a poem written by Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996.
Statistics refers to a branch of mathematics that collects and analyzes numbers to infer proportions in a whole based on the given data. In the poem, the speaker goes from exact data to approximate numbers to show that anyone can be identified with the poem, meaning that even though there could be some preconfigured numbers, the most important thing is how readers understand them and feel about the poem.
The literary device used in the sentence is a simile. Similies use the words: like or as.
