It’s a wonder to me how anyone can still be undecided about this election. These two candidates are certainly distinct. Each would lead our nation in opposite directions. What does “distinct” mean?

What makes the literal, word-for-word translation of the metamorphosis hard to read?

Read this excerpt from "a visit from the goon squad."that’s when he began singing the songs he’d been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like them—“eyes in my head,” “x’s and o’s,” “who’s watching hardest”—ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. untouched. how does the author use satire in this excerpt? the author is criticizing media censorship. the author is criticizing the idea of isolationism. the author is mocking society’s overuse of technology. the author is mocking man’s inability to freely express himself.

[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