Read the excerpt from "rhapsody on a windy night." twelve o'clock. along the reaches of the street held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory and all its clear relations, its divisions and precisions, every street lamp that i pass beats like a fatalistic drum, and through the spaces of the dark midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium. which phrase from the excerpt best indicates that the narrator is lost in thought?

Read the excerpt from "mother tongue." those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “even though tom was mary thought he was ” and the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “even though tom was foolish, mary thought he was ridiculous.” well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what tom could have been and what mary might have thought of him. so i never did well on tests like that. how does tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard english limits a person’s ability to communicate.