Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1571

As it is used in the passage, the grandmother's phrase 'a pact with time' most nearly suggests that planting fruit trees: Passage Excerpt (Literary Narrative): Walking down the moss-slick rows of her grandmother's hillside orchard, Maya examined the knobby bark of the heritage apple trees. Autumn mist hung heavy over the valley. Here were varieties forgotten by commercial supermarkets: Esopus Spitzenburg, Roxbury Russet, and Ashmead's Kernel. Maya touched a scar where her grandmother had grafted a delicate scion onto wild rootstock thirty springs ago. Her grandmother used to say that an orchard was a pact with time; you planted trees not for yourself, but for children you might never live to see. Holding a russet apple in her palm, its skin rough as fine sandpaper, Maya felt the weight of that unwritten promise.