Read the text and answer the question by selecting all the correct responses. More than one response is correct.

Political dominance belonged to the north. Germany, France, and England had massive populations and large armies that made them, in the political and military senses, the masters of Western Europe. Organized by the practices known as feudalism’, these kingdoms emerged as powerful states with refined machineries of the government. Their kings and queens were the leading figures of the age; their castles and cathedrals stood majestically on the landscape as symbols of their might; their armies both energized and defined the age. Moreover, social organization society showed a remarkable ability to adapt to new desires by encouraging the parallel development of domestic urban life and commercial networks;in some regions of the north, in fact, social organization society may even have developed in response to the beginning of the trends toward larger cities.But southern Europe took the lead in economic and cultural life. Although the leading Mediterranean states were small in size, they were significantly wealthier than their northern counterparts. The Italian city of Palermo in the 12th century, for instance, alone generated four times the commercial tax revenue of the entire kingdom of England. Southern communities additionally possessed urbane, multilingual cultures that created them the intellectual and artistic leaders of the age. Levels of general literacy within the south way surpassed those of the north, and the individual of the south place that learning to use on a large scale. Science, mathematics, poetry, law, historical writing, religious speculation, translation, and classical studies all began to flourish; throughout most of the 12th century, most of the continent’s best brains flocked to southern Europe.

Q. Why does the author mention the “Italian city of Palermo” in the passage?

(A) It had a population that spoke several different languages.
(B) Its artists and intellectuals were famous both in the north and south.
(C) Its commerce made it richer than a large northern country.
(D) It was a relatively small and unimportant Mediterranean state.
(E) To contrast with the trends toward bigger city in North

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