Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed certainly no fire. The Forestry Service the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. down. They danced "like sand in a sieve" dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes it is impossible confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political

<question>:
What could be indicated by the mention in the passage of some newspapers leaving out the question mark regarding "Only Active Volcano in U.S.?

<options>:
A The newspapers were aiming for dramatic effect by proclaiming it was indeed active
B The newspapers misprinted
C The newspapers were confirming that there was an ongoing eruption
D The newspapers were trying to pass off the dust as smoke from the volcanoes

<answer>:

A