PrepTest 116, Section 2, Question 19
Marc: The fact that the people of our(51 more words not shown)
Their dialogue provides the most(15 more words not shown)
- Atend to underrate(8 more words not shown)
- Bare looking to(9 more words not shown)
- Care likely to(15 more words not shown)
- Dare concerned about(11 more words not shown)
- Etend to be(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
I can miss life before smartphones without wishing smartphones had never been invented. Nostalgia for the past doesn't automatically mean regretting what changed.
That's my objection to Marc. He sees people looking back fondly and concludes that they regret the revolution. Robert challenges that conclusion too, but with a more specific point: they're nostalgic for a distant past that the old regime itself disliked. Missing that period doesn't show that they want the prerevolutionary regime back.
What we’re looking for
Now read the task carefully: it asks what they agree on. We were just following their disagreement, so we need to switch our attention to common ground. Both accept that people are nostalgic; they differ over what that nostalgia tells us about the revolution. I'd start by looking for something both speakers acknowledge about that reaction.
Working the answers
- A
Nostalgia can involve remembering the good parts and overlooking the bad, but neither speaker says that's happening here. They could think people remember the distant past accurately. We can't add a claim that past problems are being underrated just because it sounds like a familiar feature of nostalgia.
- B
Looking back fondly isn't the same as looking for a solution. People could miss aspects of the past without proposing that old policies be used to fix current problems. Neither speaker says they're searching history for answers.
- C
Neither speaker predicts that people will repeat old mistakes. We aren't even told that people are seeking solutions in the past, much less that doing so will lead to another mistake. C adds both an activity and a forecast.
- DCorrect
There's a little more shared ground than just the existence of nostalgia: both speakers treat it as evidence that people are troubled about the present.
Marc interprets nostalgia as regret about the recent revolution, which indicates concern with the country's current situation. Robert explicitly says the nostalgia indicates that people are troubled, while rejecting the further claim that they regret the revolution. They disagree about that specific regret, not about whether the nostalgic reaction reveals concern.
- E
Robert identifies the distant past as the period these people miss. That isn't a general rule that people become most nostalgic for whatever is farthest away in time. And Marc doesn't say how nostalgia compares across different periods at all. We can't establish agreement on this broader tendency.
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