"Mother said that I was like you, and now I know what she meant. I don't know you. I never did. And you don?t know me. You never tried. Now you are sending us away so that you don't have to know or care who we are and what we think."
My tone, rather than the words, surprised me as much as it did him. It forced me to keep on talking and him to stand there and listen. "I don?t want to go away," I said. "I don?t want to go away because I promised my friend that I would come to see her every week while she is in the orphanage."
"And what that got to do with me?" His anger, which surprise had lessened for a moment, rekindled.
When the narrator says that "my tone, rather than the words, surprised me as much as it did him" (second paragraph), it suggests that her usual way of talking to her father is:
Correct
Incorrect
The correct answer is (A).
Getting to the Answer: When asked about the function of a phrase, look a few lines before and after to get a sense of what the author is trying to convey to the reader. Here the narrator is describing talking in a way that she is not used to by forcing her father to listen. Thus, the correct answer will describe the opposite of this way of speaking.
(A) Correct: the opposite of forcing someone to listen is normally described as being "respectful" in tone
(B) Incorrect: the narrator is showing a rebellious tone in lines 1?5, so if this was her usual behavior, she and her father wouldn?t be surprised by it
(C) Incorrect: although the narrator is asserting herself to her father, she normally does not speak in this way
(D) Incorrect: although the narrator is showing emotion, she does not normally speak in this fashion