Question

questions 6 through 9 refer to the following.
(the following passage is excerpted from a book published by an american journalist and
author in 1983.)
even without the appropriate toys and clothes, lessons in the art of being feminine lay all
around me and i absorbed them all: the fairy tales that were read to me at night, the brightly
colored advertisements i pored over in magazines before i learned to decipher the words,
the movies i saw, the comic books i hoarded, the radio soap operas i happily followed
whenever i had to stay in bed with a cold. i loved being a little girl, or rather i loved being a
fairy princess, for that was who i thought i was.
as i passed through a stormy adolescence to a stormy maturity, femininity increasingly
became an exasperation, a brilliant subtle esthetic that was bafflingly inconsistent at the
same time that it was minutely, demandingly concrete, a rigid code of appearance and
behavior defined by dos and donts that went against my rebellious grain. femininity was
a challenge thrown down to the female sex, a challenge no proud, self - respecting young
woman could afford to ignore, particularly one with enormous ambition that she nursed in
secret, alternately feeding or starving its inchoate life in tremendous confusion.
\dont lose your femininity\ and \isnt it remarkable how she manages to retain her
femininity?\ had terrifying implications. they spoke of a bottom - line failure so irreversible
that nothing else mattered. the pinball machine was registered \tilt,\ the game had been
called disqualification was marked on the forehead of a woman whose femininity was lost.
no records would be entered in her name, for she had destroyed her birthright in her
8 mark for review
in the second paragraph, the author defines femininity as a \challenge\ primarily to support
which of the following points?
a
behaving according to the demands of femininity was her primary
ambition as an adolescent.
b
reconciling the demands of femininity with her ambition
presented difficulties.
c
ignoring the demands of femininity was easier for her than
fulfilling them.
d
understanding the demands of femininity was harder for her than
for her peers.

Explanation:

The passage discusses the author's struggle with femininity and ambition. The key idea is that the author had to reconcile the demands of femininity with her ambition. This is evident from lines like "a challenge thrown down to the female sex, a challenge no proud, self - respecting young woman could afford to ignore, particularly one with enormous ambition that she nursed in secret, alternately feeding or starving its inchoate life in tremendous confusion."

Answer:

B. Reconciling the demands of femininity with her ambition presented difficulties.