PrepTest 124, Section 1, Question 2
Elaine: The purpose of art museums is to(67 more words not shown)
Elaine's and Frederick's statements provide(12 more words not shown)
- Amany artistic masterpieces(8 more words not shown)
- Bmuseums should seek(9 more words not shown)
- Cart museums should(6 more words not shown)
- Dan art museum(18 more words not shown)
- Eall of the(9 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Why does preserving art require buying the best examples? Elaine's purpose sounds reasonable, but a museum might preserve a representative collection without buying the finest work from every period. If the best examples are very expensive, that choice could also use up money the museum needs elsewhere.
Frederick makes the limited budget explicit. His priority is acquiring works by recognized masters. Elaine's priority is getting the best examples from each period and genre, even when experts don't recognize some of those works as masterpieces.
What we’re looking for
So these speakers aren't arguing about whether museums should preserve art. They disagree about which art deserves the museum's money. My initial prediction is a choice between judging the individual work and relying on the artist's recognized status. Let's see how the answers express that disagreement; we need a claim on which the speakers take different sides.
Working the answers
- A
Elaine allows for acquiring works that experts don't recognize as masterpieces. That doesn't establish that many masterpieces go unrecognized, and Frederick never assesses how often experts miss them. The question concerns their purchasing priorities, not a disagreement about the frequency of expert mistakes.
- BCorrect
This states the disagreement in terms of the collection's breadth. Elaine explicitly wants examples from each genre. That gives her a yes: representing all genres is something museums should seek to do.
Frederick instead tells museums to devote their limited resources to works by recognized masters. His stated priority offers no requirement to cover every genre. When pursuing full coverage competes with acquiring those works, his recommendation puts the masters first. That's the contrast B captures.
We don't need to claim that recognized masters could never represent every genre. The disagreement is over whether representing all genres should guide acquisitions, rather than simply whether a particular collection might happen to do so.
- C
Both speakers favor preserving works of art. Elaine says that is part of the museum's purpose, and Frederick wants to ensure the preservation of the greatest artworks. Their disagreement concerns which works to preserve, so this shared goal cannot be the answer.
- D
Neither speaker gives a fallback rule for buying an unusual work when a more characteristic example costs too much. Frederick mentions limited resources, but that doesn't tell us what either person would say about this specific compromise. We can't supply two opposing views for them.
- E
Frederick's reliance on recognized masters doesn't commit him to the claim that every work experts call a masterpiece really is one. Elaine doesn't explicitly reject that universal claim either. As with A, this turns the discussion into a test of the critics' accuracy instead of the museum's acquisition policy.
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