Answer: The right answer is the A) For public education.
Explanation: This ordinance was adopted on May 20, 1785, and it remained valid for more than a century, until the passage, by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, of the Homestead Act, which also granted land to private citizens. By means of this ordinance, territory in the West that had previously belonged to the Native Americans and had later been purchased and handed over to the individual states, was first administered and surveyed and then sold among those settlers that had the funds to purchase it. The land had to be surveyed into townships of six miles square and subdivided "into lots of one mile square, or 640 acres [...] and numbered from 1 to 36." Some lots had to be reserved for future sale, and the lot N 16 in every township had to be reserved for the maintenance of public schools.