The conflict between the twins continued, and for some reason their grandmother favored the left-handed twin. the right-handed twin became angry and resentful. he was the truthful twin who always did the right thing. the left-handed twin was deceitful and did everything backward. you could never trust him.

the twins represent the two ways of the world which are in all people. the indians do not call these good and evil. they call them the straight mind and the crooked mind, the righteous man and the devious man, the right and the left.

—the world on turtle’s back

what does this passage explain about people?
a. why mothers favor some children over others b. the contrasting sides of human nature c. why there is harmony in all things d. left- and right-handedness

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant