Question

please hurry
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez.
During my early teen years in this country, I knew very little about what was actually going on in the Dominican Republic. Whenever Ia situación on the island came up, my parents spoke in hushed voices. In December 1960, four months after our arrival, Time magazine reported the murder of the three Mirabal sisters, who along with their husbands had started the national underground Dominican Republic. My parents confiscated the magazine. To our many questions about what was going on, my mother always had the ready answer, "En boca cerrada no entran moscas.” No flies fly into a closed mouth. Later, I found out that this very saying had been scratched on the lintel of the entrance of the SIM's torture center at La Cuarenta.

What is the central idea of this paragraph?

A)The author's parents gave the same responses to questions about the Dominican Republic.
B)The author's parents were afraid to discuss murders or events in the Dominican Republic.
C)The author had little interest in the politics or events of the Dominican Republic.
D)The author wanted to focus on life in a new country, not the Dominican Republic

Answer 1

The answer is B) The author's parents were afraid to discuss murders or events in the Dominican Republic.

The central idea of the excerpt is shown through expressions such as "hushed voices", "No flies fly into a closed mouth", which express the fear the author's parents felt of talking about the facts and, because of that, being associated with them. Since the Dominican Republic was under a dictatorship, people feared being killed by even discussing what was happening to the resistence and the insurgents who were indeed killed by the regime. As it happens in countries under dictatorial regimes, people are tortured and murdered even if there is no evidence of their plotting against the government. Suspicion is enough to have them assassinated.

Answer 2

Julia Alvarez was born in New York on 27 March 1950, when she was 3 months old she was taken to the Dominican Republic and then she came back to the USA when she was 10. She currently resides in the the USA.

After getting a University degree in Philosophy she decided to start her career as a writer. Her first literary work was "Homecoming" a poetry collection book. She is equally versed in narrative and poetry and she writes in both styles. Her most famous work is "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents".

In her Book "A Genetics of Justice" she narrates her own life growing up in the Dominican Republic under the oppressive rule of the Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo to which her own father was suggested to be linked, but not in a good sense, her father was linked in the dictator's assassination, reason why they moved to the USA.

By reading this excerpt, it is quite obvious that:

B)The author's parents were afraid to discuss murders or events in the Dominican Republic.

most likely because of her father involvement against the dictatorship.