Answer:
All of the above. The following lines in the excerpt from "Flight" by John Steinbeck contain personification:
"The farm buildings huddled like the clinging aphids on the mountain skirts, crouched low to the ground as though the wind might blow them into the sea."
" Five-fingered ferns hung over the water and dropped spray from their fingertips."
"The high mountain wind coasted sighing through the pass and whistled on the edges of the big blocks of broken granite."
"A scar of green grass cut across the flat. And behind the flat another mountain rose, desolate with dead rocks and starving little black bushes."
Explanation:
Personification is a literary device and a type of metaphor, in which the writer assigns a human or personal characteristic to something non-human like a nature element or an inanimate object. In the excerpt from "Flight", the author uses personification in the four fragments shown above, as in all of them the mountains, ferns and flats are described as performing human actions such as sighing, being desolated, cutting or even dropping.
