Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer:
Silas held the heavy iron shears over the table, their dull blades resting against the bolt of blue wool. For decades, these shears had belonged to his father, and their cold, heavy presence in Silas’s hand had always brought a sense of structured reassurance. Today, however, the metal felt burdensome, a weight that pulled his shoulder downward toward the floor. The workshop was silent save for the rhythmic patter of sleet against the high, soot-stained window, which filtered the grey winter light into weak pools on the floorboards. As Silas looked at the cloth, he noticed how the dust of the shop had settled into the weave of the wool, dulling its vibrant color. He opened the shears, and the grating sound of the iron hinge echoed in the quiet room. To make the first cut would seal his commitment to the trade he had inherited but never chosen. He hesitated, the shears open like the beak of a predatory bird, suspended above the fabric.
In the passage, the change in Silas's physical perception of the shears ("heavy," "burdensome") most directly symbolizes which of the following?
- AThe author's personal critique of nineteenth-century industrial labor.
- BThe physical deterioration and eventual collapse of the workshop setting.
- The growing emotional weight of Silas’s inherited familial obligation.Answer
- DThe chronological sequence of steps required to cut the wool.
- EThe narrator's objective description of the tool's actual physical weight.