Read this excerpt from “harrison bergeron” by kurt vonnegut, jr.:
“you been crying? ” he said to hazel.
“yup,” she said.
“what about? ” he said.
“i forget,” she said. “something real sad on television.”
“what was it? ” he said.
“it’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said hazel.
which statement best describes the intended aesthetic impact of this excerpt?
a. by hazel’s forgetting why she had been crying, the author leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied.
b. by george’s recognition that hazel has been crying, the author shows that he is no longer handicapped.
c. by hazel’s failure to remember seeing her son die on tv, the author reveals his compassion for her character.
d. by showing hazel crying, the author reveals that she is able to express feelings, leaving the reader heartened.

(1) fire extended humans’ geographical boundaries by allowing them to travel into regions that were previously too cold to explore. (2) it also kept predators away, allowing early humans to sleep securely. (3) fire, in fact, has been a significant factor in human development and progress in many ways. (4) other obvious benefits of fire are its uses in cooking and in hunting. (5) probably even more important, however, is that learning to control fire allowed people to change the very rhythm of their lives. (6) before fire, the human daily cycle coincided with the rising and setting of the sun. (7) with fire, though, humans gained time to think and talk about the day’s events and to prepare strategies for coping with tomorrow. the sentence that expresses the main idea is: (type the number of the sentence. then click “go.”)