Q18 - Each child in a group

[lhermary]

Why is answer C better than B? Wouldn't context help the more experienced readers? How does sounding out words help the more experienced readers on the second activity?

Thanks

[noah]

The discrepancy we need to resolve in this question is why would beginning readers always struggle more with words in a random list than in a paragraph, while more experienced readers would struggle more with whichever of those two challenges was posed first.

(C) resolves this discrepancy because if beginning readers are using context clues to guess at words, a list will always be harder than a paragraph since there are no context clues in a list. Experienced readers, however, sound out the difficult words, so once they've done that on the first task, they should be able to do it more easily the second time.

(A) could be used to explain why the paragraph would be harder (it's longer). It definitely doesn't explain why a paragraph would be easier for the beginning readers.

(B) details how the experienced readers are better at a certain reading skill - but we don't learn anything about why either group would do better based on the task or the ordering of the tasks.

(D) explains why the experienced readers improved on the second task - but why are the beginning readers struggling more with the list, even if it's second?

(E) simply confirms that beginning readers are not as good at reading than the experienced ones - no surprise there!

Wouldn't context help the more experienced readers? How does sounding out words help the more experienced readers on the second activity?

Thanks

I think I answered your second question, but to answer your first one, while context might help the more experienced readers, (C) suggests that those readers use a different skill.

I hope that clears it up.