Q12

[lhermary]

I didn't get this one right because I stopped reading early (or at least retaining what I was reading).

Answer is in 50-52

[ohthatpatrick]

Hey, there.

I'm not sure I understood your question. Did you have a question?

I'll just attempt to explain this question. I think this is a really weird Inference question because normally we have a line reference to justify the correct answer, and on this problem we don't.

We seem to have to get the correct answer by pure elimination of the others and by going off the general thrust of the passage.

On a 1st pass, here are my thoughts:

A) seems sketchy because it makes a causal claim that seems unfounded. When did they tell us that Spain's cultural conservatism influenced Spanish becoming a stable language? The only discussion of Spanish's 'stability' was the 1st P discussion about Castillian Spanish being a standardized idiom. The author only brought that up to counter a misconception that Latin American poetry is as standardized as Spanish poetry.

B) the "only recently" is the extreme give-away to this answer. Can't justify that anywhere in the passage.

C) is trying to connect two ideas from the passage, the uncritical attitude from the 2nd P and the cultural conservatism from the 3rd P. To justify this inference, I would need an excerpt from the text that connects those two ideas. I don't see one.

D) is trying to connect two ideas as well, the Latin American poets' interest in other world cultures and their use of Japanese words and phrases. So close --- lines 39-43 connect the interest in other world cultures to the use of Japanese poetic forms (using "for example" as the connective tissue) ... but Japanese "poetic forms" such as haiku are not the same thing as Japanese "words and phrases".

E) is saying something extremely reasonable, but it doesn't seem to have any textual justification. The passage never discusses how receptive Spanish poets are to Spanish-speaking poets outside of Spain. (And since we know the Spanish poets are less inclined towards outside influences, this doesn't seem to fit the gist of the passage either).

So, on a 1st pass, I don't see any answer I like. (B) and (D) are DEFINITELY wrong because they make specific claims that aren't in the passage ('only recently' and 'Japanese words and phrases').

(A) is also seemingly out for sure since it seems to be trying to blend together two separate ideas from the passage in a way that was never conveyed.

That leaves (C) and (E).

(E) has no discernible support, since no language in the text ever talks about how receptive Spanish poetry is to "other Spanish language poets outside of Spain".

(C) on the other hand has no line reference, since the author never linguistically connects cultural conservatism to uncritical of the language.

So this is a rare instance in which we'd have to live with the idea of "most supports" as "you're not really gonna find this in the passage, but which of these answers sounds the most like the passage?"

By that standard, (C) is superior. The author's purpose is to distinguish Spanish from Latin American poetry. There are 2 main ideas there:
1. Latin American poetry is more innovative/flexible with the Spanish language (Spanish poets are more uncritical of the language)
2. Latin American poets are more looking to the present or the pre-historical past, while Spanish poets tend to romanticize Spain's long history.

(C) is basically saying that those two things go together. Spanish poets romanticize Spain's long history and have little interest in going beyond it, hence they accept Spain's language and have little interest in tinkering with it.

That fits the overall gist of the passage better than (E), and since we don't have line references for either, we should go with (C).

Hope this helps. Let me know if it elicits further questions.

[kumsayuya]

in addition to (B) being incorrect, it is suggested in the first paragraph that both Spanish and Latin American stem from a standardized language, but LA has for CENTURIES (line 15) been incorporating other languages and cultures into their poetry

[Mab6q]

I'm confused by this one. The end of paragraph two tells us that when the Spanish-language incarnations of modernism and avant-grande reached Spain, the poets there greeted them with reluctance. Maybe I'm understanding that sentence wrong, but I thought it was implying that they were reluctant, but the movements did make their way to Spain. Doesn't that make E a good choice?

[blahsheep]

I'm confused by this one. The end of paragraph two tells us that when the Spanish-language incarnations of modernism and avant-grande reached Spain, the poets there greeted them with reluctance. Maybe I'm understanding that sentence wrong, but I thought it was implying that they were reluctant, but the movements did make their way to Spain. Doesn't that make E a good choice?

(E) says that Spanish poetry is "receptive" to some outside Spanish-language poets. That's entirely different from Spanish poets greeting Spanish-language modernism and avant-garde movements with "reluctance" (lines 26-27). Even if these Spanish-language movements did make their way to Spain, we are told explicitly that they were met with reluctance, which is definitely not the same thing as being "receptive" to it. Receptive implies accepting something willingly (which Spanish poets did not).