Celeste dreaded passing through Miranda Perot's house on her way to the school. Miranda had a way of gazing at a person and making him or her feel nervous. Celeste
always felt that she wore a wrong color or she forgot to wash her hair when her eyes
met Miranda's. This was not the case a few years ago. Celeste and Miranda used to
walk hand in hand and share their lunches at school. Now, they spoke less and hung
out with different crowds.
It was another dreaded Monday morning and Celeste was walking to the bus. She
felt something was not right. Waking up from a nightmare and burning the toast for
breakfast had made Celeste jittery. She felt as if it was taking hours to cross the road
and reach the bus stop. Suddenly, something grabbed Celeste by the collar and pulled
her aside. A reckless driver had almost hit her, and she was saved just in time. Celeste
was jittery all over again. When she turned around to thank the stranger, she saw a
familiar face smiling at her.
"Mention not," Miranda abruptly said. She grabbed Celeste's backpack that had
fallen on the road and gestured her to move on.
A theme of this selection is
friendships are often more complicated than they seem.
society trains people to become different from the others.
o it is easier to criticize a person than to save him or her.
O people are often insecure and unaware of their strengths.

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows. no one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. it was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the age of sugar was in sight. for beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the age of science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips. in 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. by 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. and beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. by 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—splenda—created in 1976). brazil is the land that imported more africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. cane grows in brazil today, but not always for sugar. instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in america now convert their harvest into fuel. –sugar changed the world, marc aronson and marina budhos how does this passage support the claim that sugar was tied to the struggle for freedom? it shows that the invention of beet sugar created competition for cane sugar. it shows that technology had a role in changing how we sweeten our foods. it shows that the beet sugar trade provided jobs for formerly enslaved workers. it shows that sweeteners did not need to be the product of sugar plantations and slavery.