What purpose is the author attempting to convey by including the following quotes?

Read the excerpt and answer the question. the boards themselves seemed to remain upright not from being nailed together but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might have constructed from cards. what best describes the figurative language in the sentence above? idiom simile onomatopoeia personification

How does this paragraph develop the characters in the dialogue?

0) "you're not here to read books, you're here to learn! " the childwrangler's voice screeched as we kept our picks moving rhythmically against the school walls. we had all heard about a time, back in the dark ages, when children read books at school. they say school was even a building above ground. but that was obviously dangerous. how could society thrive if the children sat around reading all day? when would they have time to learn about veins of coal, support structures, processing fuel, and all that stuff? school was important. which two central ideas in this story are most closely related?