Q18

[ohthatpatrick]

(A) FULLY determined is extreme, and more importantly this is the opposite of Borges' point. He thinks that the readers' expectations are an important ingredient in the aesthetic experience created by reading.

(B) ANY sci-fi story? That's extreme, and I think Borges only talked about the detective genre, specifically. But if we look it up, we see that in line 7-8 he says that "anything could be read as though it's detection fiction".

And in Psg B, line 32-33 says that readers can use "any reading protocol they'd like" to read a story.

So, yes, they would both say that any sci-fi novel COULD be read as detective fiction, if a reader chose to do so.

(C) EVERY work of fiction UNAMBIGUOUSLY belongs to some particular genre? I can't find Borges saying anything close to that very extreme claim. And then psg B seems to go specifically against this idea in its first couple sentences.

(D) Some figures appear in poetry but not in prose? Borges never discussed poetry in psg A.

(E) This seems like something Borges would agree to, except again it's just worded too strongly. He never said that someone cannot truly enjoy something if they don't know the genre. You could read something without knowing the intended genre and still fully enjoy it. He was only saying that what defines a genre is not just the author writing it, but the readers who are processing it with a specific set of expectations.

Hope this helps.

[JenniferK632]

I got rid of (B) because "any" seemed too strong and unsupportable. But sometimes, these extreme answer choices are the right answer. How do I fine-tune my wrong answer-radar without eliminating the right answer?

(A) FULLY determined is extreme, and more importantly this is the opposite of Borges' point. He thinks that the readers' expectations are an important ingredient in the aesthetic experience created by reading.

(B) ANY sci-fi story? That's extreme, and I think Borges only talked about the detective genre, specifically. But if we look it up, we see that in line 7-8 he says that "anything could be read as though it's detection fiction".

And in Psg B, line 32-33 says that readers can use "any reading protocol they'd like" to read a story.

So, yes, they would both say that any sci-fi novel COULD be read as detective fiction, if a reader chose to do so.

(C) EVERY work of fiction UNAMBIGUOUSLY belongs to some particular genre? I can't find Borges saying anything close to that very extreme claim. And then psg B seems to go specifically against this idea in its first couple sentences.

(D) Some figures appear in poetry but not in prose? Borges never discussed poetry in psg A.

(E) This seems like something Borges would agree to, except again it's just worded too strongly. He never said that someone cannot truly enjoy something if they don't know the genre. You could read something without knowing the intended genre and still fully enjoy it. He was only saying that what defines a genre is not just the author writing it, but the readers who are processing it with a specific set of expectations.

Hope this helps.

[dmitry]

There's no easy answer to that question, but here are a few guidelines:

*The strength of the statements we're inferring from drives the strength of our inferences. If we have absolutes or conditionals or other strong statements in our source material, then we may be able to make an extreme inference. If we're working from statements with weaker language ("some," "may," etc.), we're more likely to have a mild inference. However, it is still wise to err on the side of caution. For instance, if I know a nice absolute conditional chain like A-->B-->C, the credited inference might just be something like "Some things that are C are also B." Note that in this question, our answer is actually milder than the supporting text. The passage says that "any narrative" can be read as a detective story, while B only talks about "any science fiction story," which is just one subset of "any narrative."

*Building on the above, we never want to cross out an answer just because it is strong. Avoiding extremes is a good guessing strategy, and it may guide us to wrong answers, but there is nothing inherently wrong with extreme answers. Either a statement is inferable or it's not. We just need to find an answer that is supported and cross off those that are not.

*Comparing answers can be helpful. Note that in this case, every answer except D is an absolute and could be written as a conditional. That might make us look at D first, but once we determine that it isn't supported, we're left with all extreme answers, so we don't want to cut anything on that basis. It's also interesting to note that of the remaining answers, B is actually the mildest. It's easier to say that any story could be read in a certain way than to establish that intention fully establishes genre, or that we must know the genre to enjoy the story.