Read the following passage carefully:
"Genevieve moved through the orchard with a surveyor��s chain and a leather-bound ledger, recording each apple tree's yield with a clinical precision that reduced the ancient, gnarled limbs to mere columns of arithmetic. For her, the orchard was an enterprise of extraction, its value measured strictly in bushels and market prices. A few paces behind walked her cousin, Julian, who carried no ledger. Instead, he lingered beneath a decaying Pippin tree, tracing the mossy bark with his fingertips and watching a single, gold-leafed branch sway against the gray sky. 'We must fell this row by winter,' Genevieve remarked, jotting a brisk note about rot and replacement costs. 'It’s a drain on the soil.' Julian smiled faintly, his gaze resting on the hollow trunk where a pair of wrens had nested. 'But look at how it supports the slope, Genevieve,' he murmured. 'And the light, when it filters through those empty branches at dusk, has a clarity you won’t find in a young grove.' Genevieve sighed, not looking up from her calculations. 'Light does not pay the picker, Julian.'"
In the passage, the contrast between Genevieve’s and Julian’s reactions to the decaying Pippin tree functions primarily to do which of the following?
- heighten the reader's understanding of Genevieve’s purely utilitarian worldview by contrasting it with Julian’s appreciation for the tree’s intrinsic valueAnswer
- Bestablish that Julian’s lack of a ledger makes him ill-suited for the practical demands of farming, without revealing anything about Genevieve
- Crecount the chronological steps the cousins must take to cut down the decaying trees and prepare the soil for winter
- Dportray Genevieve as an unfeeling antagonist and Julian as a heroic defender of the natural world
- Eexpress the author’s condemnation of industrial capitalism and its negative effects on rural communities