What is the inference, assumption, evaluation. please help me ​

Plz asap read this sentence from paragraph 3 of the article. the boys and girls are merely asked to obtain the signatures of ten friends or relatives. how does the word "merely" affect the meaning of the sentence? a- it suggests that asking people to subscribe to the washington times is something negative. b- it implies that obtaining ten signatures is not a requirement for receiving a prize. c- it downplays the fact that to win the prize, children must ask people to subscribe to the washington times. d- it emphasizes that children receive the prize only if they obtain ten signatures.

Which sentence contains a participial phrase that is placed correctly? -jose paid for a hamburger scanning the cafeteria for an empty seat -peeling off her winter jacket, sierra settled into the cozy armchair. -made of soft wool, nadia pulled on a blue sweater -the cowboy jumped from the horse laughing in the face of danger

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant