Question 38
Est. 1 min
Marks:+2.000.00
Passage
Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
“Cuídese! ¡Que le vaya bien!” Juan, a friend and Salvadoran advisor, gave me a warm hug and a customary Salvadoran kiss on the cheek, and then got into his truck with his fifteen-year-old daughter. As I stood waving goodbye on the side of the busy highway, I had to chuckle. I was approaching my fortieth birthday, and had just completed my ninth visit to this tiny Central American nation. I had logged nearly three years of total time living in the country. Nevertheless, Salvadorans still insisted on worrying about me. Juan and his wife Lupe, whose house I had slept in the previous night, feared that I would get lost on the way to the airport. They therefore roused their daughter Lupita at 5:30 in the morning so that Juan could lead me to the familiar Comalapa highway before he took her to school. Juan pulled over to the side of the highway, and I pulled behind him. “Ya ubicaste, ¿verdad?” he had asked. “You know where you’re at now, right?” I assured him that I did, and thanked him sincerely for his extensive collaboration in my research and his extraordinary hospitality during my visit, then watched him drive away.
I got in my rented car and merged onto the highway again. Even at this early hour, El Salvador was alive with activity. Large, brightly painted buses that had once served school children in the United States competed with smaller, faster “microbuses” for the patronage of the Salvadorans waiting along the side of the highway. It was cane season, so huge lumbering trucks loaded with cane stalks—burnt, and then cut by hand with machetes—joined the fray. Small pick-ups with homemade metal fences around the back transported dozens of standing Salvadorans—men, women, and children—to their destinations. Still other small pickups overflowed with nonhuman cargo: coconuts, oranges, bananas, used furniture, bottled water, propane gas, and more. A multiplicity of passenger cars and small motorbikes, often with three or four passengers on one small seat, completed the scene.
(From Women in War by Jocelyn Viterna)
Question
Fill in the blank with the correct answer: It was ________ season, so huge lumbering trucks loaded with cane stalks—burnt, and then cut by hand with machetes—joined the fray.
Comprehension
Easy Difficulty
01 December 2024