Question

select the text that has a more objective tone.
dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains—a force of their own. when the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well. . . . the eeriest thing was the darkness.
there had never been dust storms like these in prior droughts. in the worst years of the 1930s on as many as a quarter of the days dust visibility to less than a mile. more soil was lost by wind erosion than the mississippi carried to the sea.
from \did dust storms make the dust bowl drought worse?\ copyright 2011 by trustees of columbia university in the city of new york, lamont-doherty earth observatory and from timothy egan, \the worst hard time,\ copyright 2006 by mariner books

Explanation:

The second text (starting with "There had never been dust storms...") presents factual information about dust storms, droughts, visibility, and soil erosion with numerical data and objective descriptions, lacking the descriptive and subjective language (like "eeriest thing", vivid imagery of dust penetrating everything) of the first text. It focuses on stating facts and statistics, making its tone more objective.

Answer:

The text starting with "There had never been dust storms like these in prior droughts. In the worst years of the 1930s on as many as a quarter of the days dust reduced visibility to less than a mile. More soil was lost by wind erosion than the Mississippi carried to the sea."