Read the excerpt from The Flight from Conversation." A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones
on. "Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits." With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken
Turkle uses the figurative meaning of the word cockpit to symbolize

i believe the answer is inference

answer: age of the protagonists.

dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by james joyce, published in 1914. they tell the stories of the irish middle class in and around dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

joyce divides the collection into three sections dealing with childhood, adolescence and maturity. therefore, one pattern he uses to organize his stories is the age of the protagonists. the initial stories deal with children, and as the stories continue, they focus on progressively older people.

answer :

the following two parts of the given excerpt from "beowulf" denote the importance of kinship and lineage :

1. hither to come; of (kinsmen's approval,

  word-leave of warriors), i ween that ye surely

2. (nothing have known. never a greater one

    of earls o’er the earth have i had a sight of)