Read the following passage:
Miriam packed the remaining teacups into the wooden crate, her movements deliberate and slow, as if each porcelain saucer held the weight of a decade. Outside, the engine of the moving van idled, a mechanical beast urging her toward the highway and the unfamiliar sprawl of the western city. Yet her eyes kept returning to the mantle, to the faint rectangular outline where the family portrait had hung for thirty years. To step across the threshold felt not like a departure, but an act of defiance against her own memory; she feared that a single backward glance, a momentary surrender to the pull of the empty rooms, would petrify her where she stood, leaving her a monument of salt in the doorway of her abandoned life.
In the passage, the allusion to becoming a "monument of salt" primarily serves to do which of the following?
- ADetail the chronological steps Miriam must take to pack her belongings and load the moving van.
- BSuggest that Miriam is being punished by a divine force for her reluctance to leave her home.
- Illustrate Miriam’s fear that dwelling on her past will emotionally paralyze her and prevent her from moving forward.Answer
- DEmphasize the physical decay and dusty atmosphere of the house she is leaving behind.
- EReflect the author's moral condemnation of Miriam’s choice to relocate to a new city.