Answer: Both are arguable. She is strong: "She had kept it" repeats her defiance of the view that "a woman alone could not keep an orchard". Yet her strength takes the form of rigid control ("She had kept it by counting"), perhaps because she has had to prove herself in a role defined by men, which leaves little room for care or vulnerability.

Answer: It reveals the distance between owner and workers: the pickers do not see Margaret as part of their community or someone who would help, just as she knew "few of their names". The repetition stresses her exclusion and implies that her economic power has isolated her from the people whose work sustains the orchard.

Answer: The family treats the land as property and production, measured in crates and ledgers across "four generations". The flood, described as coming "in sheets" and turning the creek "brown and loud", asserts nature's power, and the destruction of the oldest trees suggests that land cannot simply be owned or counted. The blank ledger page implies the old relationship must be rethought.

Answer: Counting has been her way of coping with grief and fear since her husband died, a way to impose order on loss. The flood destroys what cannot be measured, including her grandfather's trees, and exposes her guilt about the pickers, so the shield collapses. The blank page marks a moment of crisis, but also possible change.

Answer: Model (class reading): it highlights the unequal conditions of the pickers and Margaret's neglect of the cabin roofs, but it may overlook her own precarious position as a widow defying social expectations, and the grief that drives her actions. Accept any reasoned answer that names both a strength and a limitation.

Answer: Psychological: it suggests self-deception, as she avoids admitting concern or guilt about the workers. Class: it shows her valuing the property (trees) over the people working in the rain, reflecting the priorities of ownership. Also accept gender or ecocritical interpretations with reasoning.

Model answer: While a psychological reading rightly frames The Orchard as a study of private grief, the extract ultimately suggests that Margaret's loss is inseparable from a wider system that reduces both land and people to numbers. Read psychologically, her habit of walking the rows "with a ledger under her arm, counting" is a shield against the chaos of widowhood, and the gender reading deepens this by showing that her control was forged in defiance of locals who doubted "a woman alone" could manage. These readings generate sympathy, presenting her rigidity as the cost of survival. However, a class and power perspective complicates this sympathy, since the same ledger records the pickers' request for repaired roofs, which she underlines "twice" and ignores "because the price of fruit had fallen again". The workers are measured in crates and hours, and Margaret knows "few of their names", so her counting is not only a personal coping mechanism but an economic logic with real victims. An ecocritical reading extends this critique to the land itself: the flood that leaves trees "torn out by the roots" like "something that had been shot" exposes the illusion that nature can be possessed and quantified. Significantly, the pickers' survival without her help, "Nobody had thought to" wake her, reveals how thoroughly her system has isolated her. The final blank page therefore represents more than grief; it marks the collapse of a way of seeing. On balance, I largely agree with the statement, because although the psychological and gender readings explain why Margaret counts, the class and ecocritical readings reveal what that counting costs, and the ending invites her, and the reader, to imagine a different relationship with people and place.