With a laptop for every public school student, eager learners have the world at their fingertips. but will there still be eager learners, or will students be mindless drones heedlessly surfing the internet on classroom time? computers are an invaluable research tool, and laptops render content imminently accessible, but accessibility has a downside. when every question posed to a student can be answered by a search engine, what happens to that student’s need to learn? perhaps it will suffer the same fate as dusty books and desktops, vanishing in antiquity.

how does the author's word choice affect the tone of the excerpt?

the words downside and perhaps impart a skeptical tone.
the words invaluable and accessible impart a complimentary tone.
the words drones and vanishing impart a humorous tone.
the words dusty and antiquity impart an irritable tone.

A) The words downside and perhaps impart a skeptical tone.

Explanation: The tone of a text or sentence is the author's or speaker's attitude towards the audience, the subject or even the characters of the text. There are many different kinds of tones, like: positive, negative, objective, sad, angry, etc. In the given excerpt the words "downside" and "perhaps" convey a skeptical tone about whether or not students should have laptops at school.

martians or other types of aliens represent a unique fear as opposed to zombies. vampires and other types of monsters.   in most sci-fi stories, aliens come from other worlds and have different or more advanced technology.   abductions and experimentation on human bodies that involve these technologies, or the use of these technologies against human beings and the use of unknown "powers", are a type of fear that's different from that of other types of monsters.