An ancient king once asked three blind sages to identify a creature he called a pachyderm by examining it with their hands. The first sage described the creature as a thick, wrinkled hose, possibly some kind of serpent. The second sage said the creature was wide and flat, almost like a wall. The third sage reported that it was like a tree trunk with rough, wrinkled bark. What aspect of determining an idea for an essay topic does the above fable illustrate?

A. Gathering sources for research B. Narrowing a topic to manageable proportions

C. Thinking outside the box D. Analyzing a topic from different perspectives

Is D the answer

answer: round and dynamic.

- officialprodixy ☕

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.