Question

read this excerpt from henry david thoreaus essay
esistance to civil government\:
this american government, - what is it but a tradition...? it has not the vitality and force of a single living man.... it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.
which of these rhetorical devices is used here?
a. parallelism
b. metaphor
c. logos
d. rhetorical question

Explanation:

The text compares the American government to a "wooden gun" (a metaphor). A metaphor is a figure of speech that makes an implicit, implied, or hidden comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. Here, the government is compared to a wooden gun to suggest it lacks real power (like a wooden gun is not a real, functional weapon). Parallelism (A) would involve similar grammatical structures. Logos (C) is an appeal to logic. A rhetorical question (D) is a question asked for effect, not for an answer. But the key device here is the metaphor comparing the government to a wooden gun.

Answer:

B. Metaphor