Read the text, then answer the question that follows: Wild animals as viewed from a mountain camp—Camille Grant, October 2011

Through my binoculars, I viewed a group of wild animals in action. A pride of lions was sleeping when a small, yellow bus pulled up beside them. Tourists on a safari were packed into the bus like sardines in a can. Armed with cameras, they invaded the lions' territory, hoping to capture the perfect photograph. The crowd leaned out the windows, hooting and hollering, until the lions awoke. When the lions moved away, the bus rolled after them, relentlessly stalking the pride. One of the lions turned and roared to protect the young. This was greeted with cheers and a celebratory honk of the bus horn. The curious visitors observed the lions' routine for an hour before moving on. Leaving a cloud of dust, the bus headed away, taking the wild animals off to disturb someone else's home.

Review the following line from the text:

The crowd leaned out the windows, hooting and hollering, until the lions awoke.

To create a more negative connotation, the author could have replaced the word crowd with which of the following synonyms?
A) Assembly
B) Gathering
C) Group
D) Mob

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows. no one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. it was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the age of sugar was in sight. for beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the age of science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips. in 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. by 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. and beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. by 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—splenda—created in 1976). brazil is the land that imported more africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. cane grows in brazil today, but not always for sugar. instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in america now convert their harvest into fuel. –sugar changed the world, marc aronson and marina budhos how does this passage support the claim that sugar was tied to the struggle for freedom? it shows that the invention of beet sugar created competition for cane sugar. it shows that technology had a role in changing how we sweeten our foods. it shows that the beet sugar trade provided jobs for formerly enslaved workers. it shows that sweeteners did not need to be the product of sugar plantations and slavery.