Read the following passage carefully:
"The ledger lay open on the oak desk, its blue-lined pages filled with the neat, slanted script of three generations of clerks. Outside, the new electric tram rattled down the cobblestone street, its metallic hum vibrating through the thin glass of the office window. Gregory dipped his steel-nibbed pen into the inkwell, a ritual he performed with the solemnity of a high priest. For forty years, the ink had dried on these pages like sediment in a riverbed, marking the slow, predictable flow of the town’s commerce. But today, the ink felt heavy, almost stagnant. Beside the ledger sat the unopened crate containing the mechanical adding machine, its cast-iron gears glinting through the gaps in the pine slats. Gregory’s supervisor had called it the 'engine of efficiency,' a phrase that Gregory repeated to himself with a quiet, dry bitterness. To Gregory, the machine was not an engine of progress, but a monument to subtraction—a device designed to slice away the human touch, leaving only cold, uniform digits. He looked at his hand, stained at the knuckle with a permanent violet smudge of ink, and then at the iron crate. With a deliberate, slow movement, he closed the ledger, blew out the whale-oil lamp, and stepped out into the rainy twilight, leaving both pen and machine behind in the darkening room."
A student writing an essay on the passage argues that Gregory’s final act of leaving both the pen and the adding machine behind represents a rejection of the binary choices offered by his changing environment. Which of the following thesis statements best establishes a line of reasoning that supports this student's argument?
- By abandoning both his traditional writing tool and the new adding machine, Gregory rejects both the stagnation of the past and the dehumanizing efficiency of the modern era, suggesting that true autonomy lies outside the structures of labor.Answer
- BGregory’s actions at the end of the passage, where he closes the ledger and walks out of the office into the rain, show that he is tired of his forty years of service as a clerk.
- CGregory’s choice to leave the office demonstrates that he prefers the natural world, as indicated by the rain and twilight, to the industrial tram that rattles outside his window.
- DThe passage uses the contrasting symbols of the steel-nibbed pen and the mechanical adding machine to illustrate the shift from manual labor to technological automation in a changing town.
- EThrough Gregory’s bitter reaction to the adding machine, the author condemns the industrial revolution and argues that manual bookkeeping is the only way to preserve human identity.