Adapted for Da VIP Academy — "The Lot on Maple Street"

For eleven years the corner lot sat empty. Glass glittered in the weeds. Then Ms. Rivera, who had lived on the block since she was nine, asked the city for a one-dollar lease and got it.

The first summer, six neighbors showed up with shovels. The second summer, thirty did. By the third, the lot fed forty families and hosted a Friday night movie screen made from a bedsheet.

Critics said a garden could not fix a neighborhood, and they were right. It did not repair a single roof or raise a single wage. What it did was smaller and stranger: it gave people a reason to know each other's names. Crime on the block fell, though nobody can prove the garden caused it. Ms. Rivera does not claim it did. "We grew tomatoes," she says. "Everything else, the neighbors grew."

As used in the passage, 'stranger' most nearly means

• A.unfamiliar person
• B.more unusual
• C.colder
• D.less honest