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- schwingrocker
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Q5
Can someone explain how we can pick A through the context around line 16 please
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- ohthatpatrick
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Atticus Finch
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Re: Q5
It's definitely somewhat rough to get this from the context. It helps a lot to know that 'recalcitrant' basically means 'stubborn', as does 'obstinate'.
However, from the context we know that 'recalcitrant' describes a single juror that deadlocks a jury and brings a trial to a halt (that single juror is the only thing keeping the jury from reaching a unanimous decision).
Let's think about the answers:
(A) as I said, 'obstinate' means 'stubborn', which could definitely be applicable to the lone holdout on a jury. If we aren't sure what 'obstinate' means, we should keep it.
(B) 'Suspicious' doesn't really seem to reinforce anything about the lone dissenting juror.
(C) 'Careful' is decent. Perhaps the reluctant juror is being more careful than all the others.
(D) 'Conscientious' is also decent, although it basically has the same meaning as 'careful'. Because these two answers are so close to each other, they kinda cancel each other out as contenders.
(E) 'Naive' doesn't quite reinforce why a juror would be the only one to disagree with the rest of the jury. We could certainly tell ourselves a story to make that fit, but the adjective itself doesn't seem to directly relate to the situation at hand.
I would suspect that most people's other temptations on this answer are (C) and (D). It's easier to say to ourselves, "if a juror is being careful/conscientious, then he might resist going along with the majority until he's fully convinced of guilt or innocence."
However, there are two issues with those answers:
1. As we said before, they basically mean the same thing, so how would the test expect us to prefer one over the other.
2. 'Conscientious' is used by the author in the 2nd paragraph (line 32) to defend the phenomenon of hung juries as a GOOD thing. Meanwhile, Q5 is asking about the critics' impression of hung juries. Since we know the critics find hung juries to be problematic, we should expect a negative adjective to be used as the correct answer.
Hope this helps.
However, from the context we know that 'recalcitrant' describes a single juror that deadlocks a jury and brings a trial to a halt (that single juror is the only thing keeping the jury from reaching a unanimous decision).
Let's think about the answers:
(A) as I said, 'obstinate' means 'stubborn', which could definitely be applicable to the lone holdout on a jury. If we aren't sure what 'obstinate' means, we should keep it.
(B) 'Suspicious' doesn't really seem to reinforce anything about the lone dissenting juror.
(C) 'Careful' is decent. Perhaps the reluctant juror is being more careful than all the others.
(D) 'Conscientious' is also decent, although it basically has the same meaning as 'careful'. Because these two answers are so close to each other, they kinda cancel each other out as contenders.
(E) 'Naive' doesn't quite reinforce why a juror would be the only one to disagree with the rest of the jury. We could certainly tell ourselves a story to make that fit, but the adjective itself doesn't seem to directly relate to the situation at hand.
I would suspect that most people's other temptations on this answer are (C) and (D). It's easier to say to ourselves, "if a juror is being careful/conscientious, then he might resist going along with the majority until he's fully convinced of guilt or innocence."
However, there are two issues with those answers:
1. As we said before, they basically mean the same thing, so how would the test expect us to prefer one over the other.
2. 'Conscientious' is used by the author in the 2nd paragraph (line 32) to defend the phenomenon of hung juries as a GOOD thing. Meanwhile, Q5 is asking about the critics' impression of hung juries. Since we know the critics find hung juries to be problematic, we should expect a negative adjective to be used as the correct answer.
Hope this helps.
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