Read the excerpt from part two of trifles.

mrs. hale. it’s log cabin pattern. pretty, isn’t it? i wonder if she was goin’ to quilt or just knot it? (footsteps have been heard coming down the stairs. the sheriff enters, followed by hale and the county attorney.)

sheriff. they wonder if she was going to quilt or just knot it. (the men laugh, the women look abashed.)

what is ironic about this excerpt?
the men laugh at the women, and the women find themselves feeling very embarrassed by this.
the men believe the women are incapable of discovering anything of substance when, in fact, they are the ones who discover evidence.
although they are considered to be good, knowledgeable homemakers, the women are puzzled by which stitching technique was used in the quilt.
although the women are in mrs. wright’s kitchen, they are unfamiliar with many of the items that they find.

The answer is:

The men believe the women are incapable of discovering anything of substance when, in fact, they are the ones who discover evidence.

Irony refers to saying the opposite of what one means, usually for humor or emphasis.

In the excerpt from the play "Trifles," by Susan Glaspell, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters actually solve the mystery of Mr. Wright's death by finding evidence in the kitchen. However, the men believe the women are unable to notice anything, let alone to determine what really happened the previous night.

fiction/fantasy

explanation:

word count 168

serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.