What is an ad hom attack?

Writing about thing people usually do

Read the passage. (1) the first skateboard was constructed of old roller-skate wheels attached to a piece of wood. (2) improvements were made to the skateboard in 1959. (3) the year that the first commercially made skateboard appeared. (4) soon after, skateboarding began to grow in popularity. (5) in 1963, skateboard manufacturers formed the first professional skateboarding team. (6) that same year, the first organized skateboard competition took place, in california. which is the most effective way to correct the fragment in sentence 3? attach the fragment to sentence 4. attach the fragment to sentence 2. insert the phrase in the united states to the end of the fragment. insert the verb had before the verb appeared.

[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