Q25 - Essayist writing in 2012: At its onset

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle-Support

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Too early to understand ebooks as a medium.
Evidence: Ebooks haven't yet taken their ultimate form, they've only carried content from the old medium they're replacing.

Answer Anticipation:
We're trying to justify the wording that it's "too early to understand" ebooks. The author must be assuming that "understanding something as a medium" is not just about understanding the content it's carried over from previous media, it's about what sort of content the medium has in its ultimate form. We could predict a Bridge idea principle, "If it's not yet ultimate form -> too early to understand" or "If it's only got carried-over content from old medium -> too early to understand". Or we could predict a Rule-of-thumb principle, "To understand a medium, we should look at the new content that arrives on the medium in its ultimate form".

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This has the right consequence but not a matching trigger. The author's argument was not "since we don't yet understand printed books, it's still too early to understand ebooks".

(B) This is a rule about how closely one medium can resemble another, not about whether we can undertand a medium.

(C) This is a rule about what ultimate form a medium will take, not whether we can understand that medium

(D) YES, this works. It says "If we haven't observed the evolution of content, then we can't understand the medium". Since the content of ebooks has not yet evolved (it's only carried-over content from printed books), we haven't observed the evolution of ebook content, and thus we can't understand the medium of ebooks.

(E) This is a rule about which medium can replace another, not whether we can understand a medium.

Takeaway/Pattern: Only (A) and (D) were really worth reading on a first pass, since they were the only rules dealing with the issue of the conclusion: whether or not we understand a medium.

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