What is the function of the first two sentences of this passage

American history (is, are) studying the american colonies.

Which line in this excerpt from the great gatsby by f. scott fitzgerald contains a simile? about half way between west egg and new york the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. this is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Read the quote from zimmermann in the code book. a future government could inherit a technology infrastructure that's optimized for surveillance, where they can watch the movements of their political opposition, every financial transaction, every communication, every bit of e-mail, every phone call. everything could be filtered and scanned and automatically recognized by voice recognition technology and transcribed. it's time for cryptography to step out of the shadows of spies and the military, and step into the sunshine and be embraced by the rest of us. which question does this paragraph answer? why does zimmermann think encryption is important? what kind of encryption did zimmermann invent? how does zimmermann’s encryption work? who made encryption based on zimmermann’s work?