Periodically, Trujillo would demand a tribute, and they would acquiesce. A tax, a dummy vote, a portrait on the wall. To my father and other men in the country, the most humiliating of these tributes was the occasional parade in which women were made to march and turn their heads and acknowledge the great man as they passed the review stand.
If you did not march, your cédula would not be stamped, and without a stamped identification card, you could do nothing; in particular, you could not obtain your passport to leave the country under the pretext of wanting to study heart surgery. This was the second escape—this time with his whole family—that my father was planning.
The day came when my mother had to march. The parade went on for hours in the hot sun until my mother was sure she was going to faint. Her feet were swollen and hurting. The back of her white dress was damp with sweat. Finally when she thought she could not go one more step, the grandstand came into sight, a clutter of dress uniforms, a vague figure on the podium.
Which statement best analyzes how the author develops the central idea across the paragraphs?
Alvarez traces how Trujillo demanded the tributes, how her family reacted, and how it was finally her mother’s turn to pay tribute.
Alvarez describes how her family reacted to Trujillo’s demands and how that affected their lives when they left the Dominican Republic.
Alvarez retells her mother’s humiliating experience of paying tribute to a dictator she did not support.
Alvarez describes how Trujillo’s mandatory taxes and tributes affected her mother in a negative way.
1 answer
The statement that best analyzes how the author develops the central idea across the paragraphs is:
Alvarez traces how Trujillo demanded the tributes, how her family reacted, and how it was finally her mother’s turn to pay tribute.
This option effectively captures the progression of events, highlighting Trujillo’s demands, the family's response, and culminating in the specific experience of the narrator’s mother, which reflects the broader theme of submission to a tyrannical regime.
