Q13

[Lpm62229]

I don't understand how E is right, where in the passage do you see any mention of illuminating scholorships, you see specialists and scholors but no mention of scholorships, and they mention that the language specialist leave works of theology and science to non-philological trained people, but we can't make an inference that the specialist are philologists??? I got A, because the passage says that Newton is difficult, and that the scholors that read militon find ample guidance, which I assume to be pretty similar to being straightforward, I might be making to long of an inference

[ohthatpatrick]

When the question stem is of the form,
"the author mentions ____ in order to"
"the author's reference to ____ serves to"
"the author does ___ primarily to"
the test is asking "how does this specific detail relate to the broader point/purpose of the surrounding sentences?"

I think of these as "bookend" questions, because the correct answer is almost always a paraphrase of the sentence that came before (occasionally the sentence after) the specific lines/detail we're asked about.

Since this Milton/Newton sentence is the last in its paragraph, I would surely suspect that the answer will reinforce something from the previous sentence.

The previous sentence, lines 17-22, says that language specialists analyze poetry and orations but don't analyze works of theology, science, law, and medicine.

The sentence about Milton and Newton just fleshes this thought out by saying, "for example, there's plenty of language analysis [scholarship] regarding the poet Milton, but little or no language analysis regarding the scientist Newton".

In (E), we would match up 'illuminating scholarship' with 'ample guidance' and 'neglected' with 'little or none'.

In terms of decoding that 'philologists' are language specialists, we are given that gist in lines 17-22. That sentence says that language specialists focus on X, while they leave Y to people who DON'T have philological training.

So we can infer that language specialists have philological training.

As far as (A) goes, the passage isn't telling us that Milton is easier to read than Newton. It's telling us that language scholars have dedicated more time to helping us understand Milton than they have to helping us understand Newton.

Again, I think you'll find these types of "in order to" / "serves to" / "primarily to" questions much easier if you realize that the task is essentially to pick an answer choice that reinforces whatever point was being made in the previous sentence.

The previous sentence wasn't telling us that some writers are more challenging than others. It was telling us that language specialists have done most of their work on poets/orators and have done barely any work on scientists/lawyers/theologians.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you still have reservations about any of the word-choice "symbol-swapping" the answer choices are doing. (i.e. 'language specialist' = 'philologist', etc.)