Let’s take a look at what makes the wrong answers wrong:
(A) doesn’t work because of “puzzled.” The author never says that the majority of people puzzle him, or that he can’t understand anything about them.
(B) doesn’t work because the author never specifically says anything hostile about the majority of people, either. He never says that he wishes anything painful or devastating would happen to them, even though it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have much respect for their intellectual abilities.
(C) doesn’t work because the author never says anything to indicate that he respects the majority of people.
(D) doesn’t work because the author never says that he doesn’t care about the majority of people, which is what “indifferent” would require if it were going to be the correct answer to this question.
Page 674, Question 9
This question often seems challenging at first, but if we remember to follow the text carefully we can get through it. Most students, instead, try to answer it by interpreting the passage from a literary standpoint, which can only bring trouble.
The sentences about Clayton’s complexion appear at the end of a paragraph about Clayton’s behavior and appearance. That paragraph indicates that his sense of humor was a “counterpoint to his own beliefs,” indicating that at least one aspect of his personality seems to contradict another aspect of it. This is why (A), which mentions his “complicated nature,” is the correct answer.
The other choices can’t be right, since the text doesn’t mention him being erratic, complacent, loyal, or argumentative in the text surrounding the citation.
This question often causes students to give up on the idea of finding an answer spelled out on the page, so it’s a very good example of how we must always insist on an objective answer, even when there doesn’t seem to be one at first.
Page 707, Question 8
People often fail to read this question carefully enough, and get it wrong as a result.
Many people incorrectly choose (B), because the first passage mentions an “exclusive” “concern” with “classification,” while the second passage mentions the ways certain scientific “possibilities” are “limit[ed]” (lines 18 and 19). But the problem with (B) is that the answer choice talks about the limits on “present-day science,” while passage 1 talks about an exclusive concern that lasted “for the next hundred years” after Linnaeus’s work, which happened in the 18th century according to line 1. So the first passage is talking about a limit that existed for 100 years after the 18th century, which means it wouldn’t apply to “present-day science,” since the present day is much more than 100 years after the 18th century.
(A) ends up being correct because the first author refers to Linnaeus’s “enormous and essential contribution to natural history,” while the second author mentions “the value of the tool [Linnaeus] gave natural science.” (For this answer choice, it helps to realize that the terms “natural history” and “natural science” both refer to an area of study that is probably best known these days as “biology.” In other words, “natural science” and “natural history” are synonyms, even if the words “science” and “history” aren’t synonyms by themselves.)
Once again, the test gives us an excellent reminder of the importance of reading everything very carefully.
Page 708, Question 11
Here, as always, it will be very important to read the question, the answer choices, and the relevant text extremely carefully to make sure we don’t fall for any traps.
The correct answer is (C) because the text describes how an actor would seem to die in one movie and then reappear alive, and transformed into someone new, in a later movie (lines 11 through 14). It then talks about movies being “illusions” in line 18 and their characters as “imaginary” in line 24, so (C) is correct.
Many people choose (E), which seems like a very similar choice, but we have to be careful to note the differences between (E) and (C). (E) says that the actual plots of the movies were implausible, but this doesn’t reflect the original text if we read carefully. The original text describes somebody dying in one movie and then appearing alive and in a different costume in another movie. So we’re not talking about a plot in which someone dies and is resurrected and transformed, which might be “implausible;” we’re talking about one movie in which someone dies (which is plausible) and another movie where another character played by the same actor is an “Arab sheik” (which, again, is plausible). So the idea of a story with an implausible plot being told doesn’t fit the text; the text says that people were upset to realize that the actual things on the screen couldn’t be real, since people who died in one movie were alive in a later movie. It doesn’t say that the individual plot of a particular movie itself was implausible.