Q11 - In her presentation of important works of art...

[ohthatpatrick]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Inference (most strongly support)

Break down the Stimulus:
Read to combine ideas using Conditional, Causal, Quantitative, or Comparison/Contrast language.
The strongest claim is the conditional 2nd sentence: a pretense of objectivity NEVER succeeds. This overlaps with the 1st sentence, in which Waverly claimed a pretense of objectivity.

Any prephrase?
We can combine the 1st and 2nd sentence to derive the idea that "Waverly's attempt at being purely objective did not succeed".

Correct answer:
D

Answer choice analysis:
A) We know nothing about Waverly's beliefs, only that she claimed to write an objective art history book.

B) "Only" is a big ol' red flag. How would we know this? We know nothing about what's included in her book, other than that she was trying not to praise it or insult it. The last sentence may bait people into this answer, but it's very possible that Waverly included art she likes, art she hates, and art to which she's indifferent. All the last sentence would indicate is that Waverly wrote better about the stuff she likes than she did about the stuff to which she does not have strong opinions.

C) The opposite is true, from what Waverly claimed. Even though we know our critic is saying Waverly will not have succeeded in being objective, we can't infer that Waverly fully intended to be subjective.

D) Yes. This is what can be derived by combining the first two sentences.

E) This is like (C). It tries to go from the valid inference that Waverly could not have succeeded in being objective to speculative ideas about whether Waverly ever really intended or desired objectivity in the first place.

Takeaway/Pattern: We aren't trying to predict our answer on Inference, since we're ultimately at the mercy of the answer choices, but we can anticipate where a possible answer might come from by actively reading the information with the goal of combining ideas where possible. One of the key signs of potential synthesis is "overlapping information". Sentence 1 and 2 both discussed "objectivity".

#officialexplanation

[priyanka.krishnamurthy]

Hello:
Just to clarify -- is B incorrect because "strong opinions" does not necessarily mean that she LIKES the art and would therefore ONLY write about it? I.e. we cannot infer this because a. the "only" in the AC is a red flag and b. strong opinions =/= art Waverly likes?

Thanks!

[HeningS74]

Hi! I'm having trouble understanding what pretense objectivity means. Are we assuming here what the Waverly claims is pretense? Thanks!