What is the theme in this excerpt from the folktale “Babes in the Woods”? Once upon a time there lived two little children whose parents were ill unto death. They [the parents] begged their brother to care for the two little ones as he would his own.

The uncle promised he would be a father to them, but he soon began to scheme to possess the money the parents had left in his care for the children. He sent for two robbers and bargained with them to take the two babes into the woods and kill them.

After going many miles into the woods one of the robbers said, "Let us not kill the little children, they never harmed us." The other robber would not consent, so they came to blows. This frightened the children so much that they ran away and did not see the robbers again.

They wandered on and on until they became so tired and hungry that at length they sat down at the foot of a tree and cried as if their hearts would break. The little birds heard them and began to trill sweet lullabies, which presently lulled them to rest.

The birdies knew that the children would die of cold and hunger, so they covered them with leaves of crimson and brown and green. They then told the angels in Heaven the sad story of the lost babes, and one of the white-robed angels flew down to earth and carried both the little ones back to Heaven, so that when they awoke they were no longer tired and hungry, but were again with their dear mother.

A.
Greed never pays.
B.
Innocence is always rewarded.
C.
Justice always prevails.
D.
Kindness never goes unrewarded.

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.

Why isn’t the mood saddened by this tragic event

Which sentence is an example of a paradox