Read the following passage from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I
succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life;
nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing
animation upon lifeless matter.
The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this
discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture.
Which common notion from the historical context surrounding Frankenstein
does this excerpt most clearly show?
O A. Enlightenment thinking promoted learning and advanced
education for the betterment of human life.
B. The Romantics de-emphasized the influence of reason, and
instead emphasized human emotion.
C. Scientists were willing to interfere with the natural order that was
ordained by God, becoming god-like in their explorations.
D. Some doctors were unscrupulous, selling false medicinal
remedies and experimenting at the risk of their patients.

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant