Select the correct text in the passage.
Which sentence best expresses the central idea that the future was very different from what the time traveler had imagined?
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells (adapted excerpt)
As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the
conversation by pointing to the Time Machine and to myself. Then, hesitating for a moment how to express Time, I pointed to the sun and at once a
quaintly pretty little figure in checkered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.
For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these
creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had always anticipated that the people of the yearlight Hundred and Two
Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be
on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children-asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I
had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind and for a moment I felt
that I had built the Time Machine in vain
I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so, bowed and
then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received with
melodious applause, and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered
