Why might epics be similar across cultures?
a. the poets who created them were directly influenced by one another.
b. most people's lives follow the same basic patterns.
c. the epic genre has spread throughout the world from a single source in africa.
d. all of the above are correct.

Select the correct text in the passage. which line in this excerpt from amy tan's "mother tongue" shows that tan changes her language depending on the audience? i was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk i had already given to half a dozen other groups. the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, the joy luck club, and it was going along well enough, until i remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. my mother was in the room. and it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of english i have never used with her. i was saying things like "the intersection of memory upon imagination" and "there is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"—a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms of standard english that i had learned in school and through books…