Read the excerpt from Heart of a Samurai. A bird! He sat up and shook his friend. "Goemon-chan!" he said. "A bird!"

Goemon opened one eye. "It's a bird, that is true:" Goemon closed his eyes again. "Ahodori-fool bird . . ."

"But, Goemon-chan!" Manjiro shook him again. "Doesn't a bird mean there could be land nearby?"

"Yes," Goemon sighed. Suddenly his head popped up. "Did you say land?"

The two boys shook the others, and they all stared over the side of the boat at a small, dark line on the horizon. As the boat drifted toward it, the dark line grew into a tall, looming shape: an island.

Which best states how the excerpt keeps readers interested in the story?

It creates suspense.
It explains a past event.
It describes a conflict.
It quickens the story’s pace.

word count 168

serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

so is this a rhetorical question?

i think it is d tell if im wrong