Prática Praxis Core Reading

Read the passage below, from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883, public domain). The narrator is a steamboat pilot looking back on his training. Ellipses mark omitted text. "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. . . . I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. . . . But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that. . . . No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat." According to the passage, what would a floating log have signaled to the trained pilot?

• AThat wind would come the next day
• BThat a reef was forming nearby
• CThat the channel was shifting
• DThat the river was rising