PART A: Which statement identifies the central idea of the text?
answers for common lit ALTRUISM: WHY WE RISK OUR OWN WELL-BEING TO HELP OTHERS

Complete the sentence. when trying to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word, you should first replace the unfamiliar word with a synonym that you identified based on the context clues. remove the unfamiliar word from the sentence. think of an antonym for the unfamiliar word. look for context clues that indicate the word's meaning.

John asks mond why they have to have whole groups of identical deltas. why not make everyone an alpha plus like bernard and helmholtz? are you satisfied with mond’s answer?

[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