Solution:
Following an experiment with participants identifying a target using green and red circles for a reward, Zachary Rooper and his team concluded that the attention levels of teenagers are tied to rewarding stimuli.
Once adolescents associate an action with a reward, they keep pursuing that reward. This may explain why they often choose the gratification of social media over studying or why they reply to texts even while driving.
Clarification:
However, this evidence falls short of decisively backing the claim that adolescent minds are in a constant search for rewards. Their distractions and inattention may align more with their studying behaviors and personal interests rather than simply expecting rewards from social media platforms. While the reward system can indeed encourage middle and high school students, it shouldn't be linked to other habitual behaviors. Parents often incentivize good school performance, but focus can also stem from individual personality traits, study habits, and so forth.
Thus, Rooper's assertion may partially reflect the teenage demographic but should not encompass the entirety of their behavior, as many actions relate to their developmental stage and age.
The device Bob Kaufman employs when he repeats the word "raga" at the start of those lines is REPETITION. Repetition is a rhetorical or poetic technique in which the same word or phrase is reiterated to stress an idea.
Answer:
a. To communicate how uncommon it is to discover the bloom.
Explanation:
In the passage presented, the author reflects on the yucca tree, describing its potential uselessness and noting that its "woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful." However, despite the tree’s shortcomings, it produces a remarkably valuable bloom, which is enclosed in a "luxurious, creamy, cone shaped bud the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap." This bloom is treasured by the Indians, who would "roast the prize for their own delectation," illustrating its significance as something to be valued beyond its apparent rarity. The author uses the term "prize" to emphasize the bloom's rarity and the effort required to obtain it from its "fence of daggers".
