PrepTest 126, Section 2, Question 16
With their recognition of Maxine Hong Kingston as(422 more words not shown)
It can be inferred from(23 more words not shown)
- Aa literary genre(3 more words not shown)
- Ba thematically organized(6 more words not shown)
- Cpartially idiosyncratic memories(2 more words not shown)
- Dthe retention in(6 more words not shown)
- Eeasily identifiable thematic(3 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
Start with stories a person has heard and remembers, rather than assume these are stories about that person's own life. The surrounding sentence says memory sifts and reconstructs their essential elements. So we're talking about remembered versions of stories, with room for variation in how an individual recalls them.
Working the answers
- A
“Personally remembered” doesn't mean told in the first person. A story someone remembers could concern other people, and the phrase isn't naming a literary genre.
- B
Remembering a story and narrating your own past are different things. A parent could pass down a fable without either the parent or the child having lived through its events.
- CCorrect
“Idiosyncratic” here means particular to an individual. This is a more technical way of expressing the variation in those remembered versions. The main events of a familiar fable might stay the same while a teller remembers or reconstructs some details differently. The words “sift and reconstruct” support that distinction; we don't need every memory to be completely unique.
- D
This describes the exact-word retention Kingston contrasts with her own process. It gives us the wrong side of that contrast.
- E
Themes can be elements of stories, but the phrase refers to remembered stories, not a set of easily identifiable literary issues.
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