The headmistress of the boarding school was a buttoned-up, austere woman with a tightly wound, slate-gray bun at the top of her head and clunky black shoes on her feet. She made sure that our uniforms were complete at inspection every morning, and if one of us dared to wear a warmer pair of socks than the thin, oatmeal-colored ones we were issued, there would be trouble. What does the use of the word austere imply?

that the headmistress is concerned about her students
that the headmistress is not a kind person
that the headmistress is kind to some students
that the headmistress is uncomfortable

[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