Read the excerpt from "Machu Picchu: A City in the Sky.” Machu Picchu was once an important place. It was a hidden retreat, or resting place, for an Incan emperor. His name was Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. He ruled from 1438 to 1471. The city was built around 1450 CE. That was a time of war between the emperor and other Incan leaders. In this hidden city, he was safe from his enemies.

What is the central idea of the excerpt?

a)Machu Picchu, a hidden city, was built for an Incan emperor in the 1400s.
b)Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, an Incan emperor in the 1400s, had many enemies.
c)Machu Picchu, a city in Peru, has been a hidden retreat for six hundred years.
d)Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, fleeing his enemies, discovered an Incan retreat.

[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