LR Drill Set 4, Question 2
Tasha: Novels rather than poetry make up most(74 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(7 more words not shown)
- AMost nineteenth-century male(9 more words not shown)
- BIn the nineteenth(12 more words not shown)
- CMost nineteenth-century female(4 more words not shown)
- DThe institutions providing(9 more words not shown)
- EMost of the(10 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Could someone tune out the noise and still write a poem?
Tasha says women wrote more novels because they lacked quiet writing rooms, and poetry takes more concentration. I can follow the proposed connection: noise interrupts concentration, so the more demanding writing suffers. But the connection is still something to examine. A noisy room doesn't automatically make concentration impossible.
Helen accepts the lack of private rooms but offers a different explanation. Women who couldn't afford those rooms also couldn't afford the education that poetry required. For Helen, the problem is money: no money for training, so less poetry.
What we’re looking for
The question asks us to weaken Helen's explanation. Now we should focus on that money claim. Perhaps women who wrote poetry included both rich and poor women, or women with very different educational backgrounds. Evidence like that could make the proposed financial barrier less convincing. Another explanation could also help, but it needs to challenge Helen's account of why women lacked the training. We don't have to settle Tasha's concentration argument to do that.
Working the answers
- A
We're told about male writers' rooms, but not their money, education, or poetry. That doesn't tell us why women lacked the training Helen describes. Even if men also worked without private rooms, Helen's account of the financial barrier facing women could remain unchanged.
- B
This initially sounds helpful to Tasha: poets were more likely to have private writing rooms. But Helen can explain that same pattern. People with enough money for a room might also have enough money for training. The fact that rooms and poetry go together doesn't tell us whether quiet or money accounts for the connection. B doesn't directly undermine Helen's explanation.
- C
A woman could write both poetry and novels. That doesn't show why novels made up most of women's writing overall. Imagine a small group of women who could afford training: they write both, while a much larger group writes novels alone. C could be true with Helen's financial explanation still intact.
- DCorrect
What if having enough money wouldn't get a woman into the school? If the institutions excluded women, the barrier was admission, regardless of whether a woman could pay. That challenges Helen's explanation of the missing education as a result of poverty.
This takes a different route from comparing rich and poor poets. It gives us another reason women lacked access to training. We don't have to prove that noise was the real problem; showing that money misidentifies the educational barrier is enough to weaken Helen.
- E
I don't need to know whether men wrote most of the novels. We are explaining the balance between novels and poetry in women's writing. Women could produce a small share of all novels and still write far more novels than poems. The comparison with men's output doesn't explain that pattern.
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