Question 15 of 20
Read this excerpt from H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds:
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader,
revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000
miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is
barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the
nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and
long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its
surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is
scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have
accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life
could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary
for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century,
expressed any idea that intelligent life might have
developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly
level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is
older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily
follows that it is not only more distant from time's
beginning but nearer its end. The secular cooling that must
someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed
with our neighbour, Its physical condition is still largely a
drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous
country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be
to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and
lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would
seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars.
Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard
as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,
their only escape from the destruction that, generation
after generation, creeps upon them.
In this passage, what does H. G. Wells use to build suspense?
OA. Flashback
OB. Dialogue
OC. Character development
D. Word choice and language