Read the excerpt from "A Modest Proposal."I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

Swift describes cooking and eating a child in the calm, practical language of a recipe. This understatement makes the brutal proposal sound ordinary, shocking the reader and drawing attention to the cruelty and absurdity of the plan. The passage is not meant to show that the proposal is genuinely reasonable or that Swift plans to carry it out; the correct choice is “to grab the reader’s attention by using understatement to talk about brutal acts.”

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