Answer:
D. the author describes Maggie's thoughts about beginning the journey
Step-by-step explanation:
There are only a couple spirts of dialouge between her & a gas pumper in the middle of the passage; everything else you see in the wall of text, is her quietly musing to herself as she drives away from LA.
I don't think A is right because the only thing the excerpt tells us about Maggie's looks, it that she's 16 year old Californian
B is horrible because we hardly get a sentence mentioning her dad. Her friends get more mentions, first about how she worries for them, then how much Maggie wents to throw a TGI June bash or something
C is a tricky contedor for the answer. It would be acceptable if there were no other options, but I believe D is better becuase her development as a character continues even after the 1st paragraph, which gave some breadcrumbs as to why she left
"It wasn’t as if she were in danger from the Greenston plant in the desert hundreds of miles away, but those headlines had been the convincing factor in her decision"
"hour after hour as she drove north of Los Angeles, she had felt more and more competent and more secure. Until now."
Maggie, from what I can tell, wants to be left to her devices. She drove out to the middle of nowhere not just to get some distance from the nuclear power plant, but also from whatever is going on in her life.
By the end of the passage though, she learns that a 16 year old probably shouldn't be doing cross-country driving out in the middle of Californian nowhere.
"she had begun to think that maybe being sixteen and a half didn’t make her that smart; maybe a trip like this was a little much for her"
The quote above isn't a reason for her starting her road trip, but i'd dare to say it's even more developing than whatever C suggests. Both her reason & this reflection are going on in her head, you can acknowledge both paragraphs as a developing force by chosing D instead of C.
admittedly, the argument for D is built on the assumption that the exceprt we're reading is just the begining of Maggie's grand journey that presumably takes place in book this passage was pulled from.
all of this could be wrong, but if I am, the testers better have better reasoning than this breakdown.
English feels so subjective sometimes