Q : In line 59, " blinding " most suggests all of the following EXCEPT :
a) unswerving
b) dazzling
c) overpowering
d) determined
e) sudden
Passage :
The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman’s adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one part of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
My mother began to tell a story about a science award
I had won in third grade. She started with the winning-
the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the
announcer called my name twice because we were way at
the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. Line5
Mama’s eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able
to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the
room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audi-
ences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she
insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her Line10
grandparents—an entire clan of storytellers competing for
a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my
mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot
through with energy. This time the story had a purpose.
She told them how my science experiment almost did Line15
not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-
grade teacher, angry that I’d forgotten to bring a large box
for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack
it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes
were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the Line20
exhibition room, and she’d emphasized that she would not
be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the
fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home.
Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the
week. They’d brought boxes the next day. I asked for the Line25
same dispensation, but was denied. The next day was the
fair, she said. That was different.)
I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experi-
ment my father had picked out for me from a textbook.
This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed Line30
each object in the air and then in water, to prove they
weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a
piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster.
Well, my mother marched me and my armload of
buoyant materials right back into school and caught the Line35
teacher before she left. The box was the only problem?
Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An
excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box
that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she
was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to Line40
follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed
directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was
more than you could say for third graders who’d brought
dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-maché
volcanoes that belched colored lava. Line45
“Don’t you ever put me in a position like that again,”
Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom.
“You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut
us out.”
We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won Line50
the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in
the city.
When Mama finished her story, my ears began to burn.
I could not help but believe that they would see through
this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on Line55
an application. They’d think we were forward and pushy.
I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I’d felt when
Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me
with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher
know that I was not as small and Black and alone as Line60
I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I
came from, she’d better believe, somebody was home.
The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father
gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from
the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused Line65
by my embarrassment.
The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condo-
lence) to the school stories that the admissions people
told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message
about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that Line70
racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live
person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason,
to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama
could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher
who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this Line75
new school would stand up for her child in her stead?
ـ
The correct answer is E
However, I thought that dazzling was the correct answer because the mother’s reaction here was full of strength and suddenness but had nothing to do with being " dazzling " 
