Q11

[yoohoo081]

Can somebody explain why answer c is wrong and b is the right answer please? I can't see the reason.

[timmydoeslsat]

I believe that the author would disagree with C.

The author views Cullen in a favorable light. To state that he wavers his persona from poem to poem ruins the stance that the author has taken. This stance is that there is not a dichotomy of being an aesthete (worried about form) and a spokesperson for racial issues.

The author claims that Cullen does both. So the author would not agree that he vacillates from poem to poem in this regard.

On questions like this we need to think, "Why did the author write the second paragraph?"

A) Contrast some successful and not successful. No.

B) Makes sense. This second paragraph begins by saying that some critics applaud his work in a certain respect. However, other critics do not like his work because of that respect when talking about racial issues. The critics feel that his poems about racial issues are no such place for his controlled poetic forms. Those critics feel that you are either about that form in your poems or you are a spokesman for racial issues. Those critics argued that Cullen was satisfying the former to the detriment of the latter.

C) Discussed above.

D) To summarize the scope? Not a good fit here. We were only told about a few of his works.

E) I found this one to be the most tempting wrong answer choice. The reason I dismissed this one was because this does not address why it was mentioned like (B) does. The author did not write the second paragraph to simply illustrate themes of Cullen. It was done to address critics. The author used the themes he wrote to begin the conversation of the critics.

[bramon.elizabeth]

I'm testing out a theory that actually worked for this question, so I'll share and I'd love to hear some MLSAT feedback :0)

The previous poster's reasoning for eliminating (E) is terrific, but I came at it another way. My theory is that when you have two really attractive answer choices but reading the question and choices again doesn't help you narrow it down (because it's easy to miss tricky words and sneaky opposites), look for the answer that subsumes the other. So here, I would say the examples are relevant BECAUSE they illustrate what themes he used. If we write it in conditional form, boom, the conclusion is that they're relevant.

This "subsuming" theory is working pretty well on LR sections too. What do you think?

[rinagoldfield]

Bramon.Elizabeth!

I don’t agree with your subsuming theory! This theory implies that more than one answer choice is correct, but one answer choice is so hugely correct that it eats up the other correct-ish answer choices. However, with very few exceptions, there is only one right answer choice. The other four are wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

When choosing between two tempting answer choices, don’t compare them to each other. Rather, compare each answer choice to the text (in RC) or to the stimulus (in LR). Practice articulating what makes wrong answers wrong (is it an issue of degree? of scope? of interpretation?) to build your wrong-answer-choice eliminating muscles.

Now to this question:

This question asks, essentially, WHY the author chooses to reference specific poems in the second paragraph. Consider the function of the second paragraph as a whole to understand the function of its parts. The author spends the whole second paragraph describing critical reactions to Cullen’s work. He cites specific poems in the context of analyzing critics’ arguments. Therefore, the poems are intended to add detail to the author’s description of the critics’ claims.

(B) states exactly this, and is correct.
(E) Line 25 describes how certain poems exemplify themes in Cullen’s work. However_ and this is tricky_ the author doesn’t cite the poems to illustrate these themes. Rather, the author cites them to illustrate the claim that "Other [critics] have found Cullen’s use of European verse forms and techniques unsuited to treating political or racial themes." The poems actually function to flesh out the critics’ arguments, not as a digression into the subject of poetic themes.

(C) is similar to (E). Lines 30-33 describe a critic’s complaint that Cullen’s poetic persona vacillates from poem to poem. The poems cited indeed reflect a poet who took on various voices. However, the poems function to illustrate the critics’ argument, not Cullens’ poetic persona.

(A) is out of scope. This paragraph doesn’t concern success.

(D) is unsupported. Again, the paragraph is about the critics’ claims, not the scope of Cullens’ thoughts on poetry.

[hychu3]

Hi,

I'd like to simplify why (E) is incorrect.

There are three poems mentioned in the second paragraph: "The Ballad," "Uncle Jim," and "Incident." (B) applies to all three of them. (E) applies to the last two but not to the first one.

(E) is tempting if you missed the first poem. In fact, both (B) and (E) are correctly applied to the last two poems. Mentioning these poems serves as illustrations of Cullen's works as relevant to the critics' claims, as (B) says. For the last two poems, but not the first one, that means illustrating themes Cullen used about racial matters, as (E) said.