North richmond street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the christian brothers' school set the boys free. an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. the other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

the former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. among these i found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: the abbot, by walter scott, the devout communicant, and the memoirs of vidocq. i liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. the wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which i found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. he had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

when the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. when we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. the space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. the cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. our shouts echoed in the silent street. the career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark
what is the overall mood of the passage?
the passage has an ominous mood throughout.
the passage has a melancholy mood throughout.
the passage moves from a cheerful to a sad mood.
the passage moves from a bleak to a foreboding mood.

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows. no one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. it was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the age of sugar was in sight. for beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the age of science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips. in 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. by 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. and beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. by 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—splenda—created in 1976). brazil is the land that imported more africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. cane grows in brazil today, but not always for sugar. instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in america now convert their harvest into fuel. –sugar changed the world, marc aronson and marina budhos how does this passage support the claim that sugar was tied to the struggle for freedom? it shows that the invention of beet sugar created competition for cane sugar. it shows that technology had a role in changing how we sweeten our foods. it shows that the beet sugar trade provided jobs for formerly enslaved workers. it shows that sweeteners did not need to be the product of sugar plantations and slavery.