Question

1 point

2. What is most likely the author's purpose for including paragraph 4 in the
excerpt?
Nationwide, eighty thousand children worked in the textile industry in the South Mother Jones
had seen how dangerous their jobs were. Barefooted little girls and boys reached their tiny
hands into the treacherous machinery to repair snapped threads or crawled underneath the
machinery to oil it. At textile union headquarters. Mother Jones met more of these mill children.
Their bodies were bone-thin, with hollow chests. Their shoulders were rounded from long hours
spent hunched over the workbenches. Even worse, she saw some with their hands off some
with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckles_victims of mill accidents.
To point out how skilled the children were at the jobs they held in the factories
To emphasize the poor pay that the children received for the hours they worked
To encourage children to be more careful when working with powerful machinery
To show the effect that factory jobs had on the health and wellness of child workers

Answer 1

Nationwide, eighty thousand children worked in the textile industry. In the South, Mother Jones

had seen how dangerous their jobs were. Barefooted little girls and boys reached their tiny hands

into the treacherous machinery to repair snapped threads or crawled underneath the machinery to

oil it. At textile union headquarters, Mother Jones met more of these mill children. Their bodies were

bone-thin, with hollow chests. Their shoulders were rounded from long hours spent hunched over

the workbenches. Even worse, she saw “some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing,

some with their fingers off at the knuckles”—victims of mill accidents.

Josephson begins the paragraph with the detail that “eighty thousand children worked in the textile

industry” nationwide. This alerts readers to the size of the problem. She then focuses on the main point of

the paragraph—the dangers the children faced. Josephson describes the dangers by using details that

Mother Jones had actually seen: the children reaching into dangerous machinery; their “bone-thin” bodies,

“hollow chests,” and “rounded shoulders”; their missing hands, fingers, and thumbs. Tying these

descriptions to what Mother Jones had personally seen allows the author to show how the “broken”

children themselves influenced Jones’s attitude toward child labor.

Step-by-step explanation: