LR Drill Set 9, Question 5
It has long been suspected that regularly reading(56 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(6 more words not shown)
- AChildren who are(27 more words not shown)
- BParents who regularly(27 more words not shown)
- CAdults who were(17 more words not shown)
- DChildren who are(23 more words not shown)
- EStudents who drop(22 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Reading to children sounds helpful. But does this study show that the reading itself keeps them in school?
Maybe the parents who read regularly also spend more time helping with homework, encouraging their children, or making home feel secure. Those other activities could help explain the lower dropout rate. The study compares children from otherwise similar backgrounds, which is useful, but that doesn't automatically isolate the effect of reading from everything that might go along with it.
There's another question we could ask: is staying in school the same as academic success? A student could stay enrolled and still earn poor grades.
But the more direct concern is why the dropout rates differ. Reading and lower dropout rates occur together; the author treats that as definitive evidence that one helps cause the other.
What we’re looking for
We're asked to strengthen the argument, so we need help answering that concern. Evidence against a competing explanation would help. If the result depends on being read to rather than some special feature of the parent-child relationship, the reading itself becomes a more convincing explanation.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
Children read to by other adults have the same dropout rate as children read to by their parents. Imagine an aunt or another adult doing the reading. The favorable pattern persists even though the reader isn't the child's parent.
That makes it harder to explain the entire result as something special about parents who read to their children, such as an unusually close relationship with those parents. Being read to is common to both groups. A doesn't eliminate every possible alternative cause or establish the conclusion definitively, but it gives the proposed role of reading additional support.
- B
This is relevant in the wrong direction. The parents who read also spend more time doing other family activities with their children. Now we have another possible reason those children stay in school: greater family involvement. B makes it harder to isolate reading as the important factor rather than strengthening that explanation.
- C
This tells us that a practice may carry from one generation to the next. It doesn't tell us whether the children who hear the stories do better in school. Why parents read to their children is different from what effect that reading has.
- D
Reading to younger siblings might be a habit children pick up from being read to themselves. But we need evidence about the academic result, not just evidence that children imitate a family activity. D doesn't connect that habit with staying in school or doing well there.
- E
Reading for pleasure and being read to as a young child are different activities. This gives us another association involving dropout rates, but it doesn't connect that association to the early reading the author credits. We aren't told that being read to produces the later pleasure reading, or that this later association establishes the proposed effect.
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