Read this excerpt from president roosevelts four freedoms speech armed defense of democratic existence is now being galley waged in four continents if that defense fails all the population and all the resources of europe, asia, africa and australasia will be dominated by the conquerors let us remember that the total of those populations and their resources in these four continents greatly exceeds the sum total of the population and the resources of the whole western hemisphere many times over what is the theme of this excerpt? a. a dismissal of the current threat b. atonement for colonial policies c. the enormity of the threat to democracy d. a plea for international cooperarion

[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