Question

Read this excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath:
And the tenant men came walking back, hands in their pockets, hats pulled down. Some bought a pint and drank it fast to make the impact hard and stunning. But they didn't laugh and they didn't dance. They didn't sing or pick the guitars. They walked back to the farms, hands in pockets and heads down, shoes kicking the red dust up.
Which best describes how the diction supports the tone of this passage?
A. The repetition of phrases that are similar in structure creates parallelism and emphasizes the idea of loss.
B. Referring to the farmers as "they" conveys the idea that the farmers belong to a different social class than the author.
C. The author uses the words "red dust" to symbolize the hard work that the farmers did just to feed their families.
D. Phrases such as "didn't laugh" and "heads down" convey sadness toward the farmers being driven from their land.

Answer 1

D. Phrases such as "didn't laugh" and "heads down" convey sadness toward the farmers being driven from their land.

Answer 2

Answer: D. Phrases such as "didn't laugh" and "heads down" convey sadness toward the farmers being driven from their land.

Explanation: The tone of a poem, sentence or story is the author's or speaker's attitude towards the audience, the subject or even the characters of the text. There are many different kinds of tones; happy, sad, positive, negative, angry, ets. In the given excerpt from "The Grapes of Wrath" we can see that the author uses phrases such as "didn't laugh" and "heads down" convey sadness toward the farmers being driven from their land.