Q10

[amandarruff]

I'm not quite certain what main makes answer C the right answer over choice E. Because the passage does talk about how the Council of Basel discipline by the church affected the development of the disciplinary system and goes into depth with this in the 5th paragraph stating that these criticisms seem to have a "paradoxical result." Can anyone help to clear this up for me! Thanks

[ohthatpatrick]

Sorry for the delay; this post fell through the cracks.

When RC questions ask
===
the author mentions ____ in order to
the author brought _____ primarily to
the author's reference to _____ serves to
===
the correct answer is usually just reinforcing the broader idea that came BEFORE the sentence with the ____ or AFTER it.

Essentially, these questions are testing WHY the author brought up a specific detail/example, so they want the broader point that is being illustrated by the specific.

Here, the broad idea before this Council of Basel sentence says "Second, church authorities themselves complained about canon lawyers' ethics".

Hmmm, "Second"? What was "First"? That traces back to line 31. Collectively, these two ideas are fleshing out line 30-31, that canon lawyers DID deviate from standards of ethics but escaped punishment.

(A) it was an example of how church authorities were expressing concern about canon lawyers' ethics
(B) no contrast - in fact, the sentence about English authorities uses "similarly"
© This works, since line 47 is support for lines 44-47, which is the 2nd prong of the author's 2-pronged argument that "the second explanation is more plausible".
(D) The Council of Basel didn't establish rules of conduct.
(E) Did the Council of Basel develop a disciplinary system? It asked a Cardinal to address the problem, but we don't know if the Cardinal developed a disciplinary system.

I see where you were going with you're thinking for (E), but you're trying to connect the Council of Basel forward in the passage. The sentence being tested begins with THUS, which means it's connected to the previous sentence. The previous sentence begins with SECOND, which means it's connected to a two-part idea. The two part idea is line 30-31, and © is just paraphrasing that.

Confusing enough?