PrepTest 133, Section 3, Question 5
Parent: Pushing very young children into rigorous study(81 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(7 more words not shown)
- AFor our nation(16 more words not shown)
- BThe developmental needs(13 more words not shown)
- COur country can(14 more words not shown)
- DA curriculum of(13 more words not shown)
- EUnless our nation(16 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Making seven-year-olds do demanding schoolwork all day might improve their performance for a while. But what if it also makes them hate school?
That's the parent's concern. The early gains don't settle whether the curriculum is good for young children. Their developmental needs may include more than academic drills, and a program that burns them out could work against what we're trying to achieve.
Notice that the parent isn't against rigorous study at every age. The passage says it makes sense in secondary school. The objection is to using that same approach with much younger children, whose needs are different. “Work them harder” is not automatically the right answer simply because harder work helps older students.
What we’re looking for
We could ask for evidence that the early approach really causes these problems. For this inference question, though, we take the parent's statements as given and look for what they support. I'd expect something about the demanding early curriculum failing to serve young children's needs. We haven't been given a complete recipe for making the nation economically competitive.
Working the answers
- A
The parent says rigorous secondary-school work makes sense, not that secondary schools currently need to become more rigorous. We don't know how demanding their curricula already are. Nor does the passage make an increase in secondary-school rigor a requirement for national competitiveness.
- B
Saying secondary-school work should be rigorous doesn't tell us whether today's high schools meet their students' needs. The criticism concerns applying that approach in the early primary years. B invents a current problem in the older students' schools.
- C
Meeting children's needs matters to the parent, but this answer makes a much broader claim: the country cannot be competitive unless every student's developmental needs can be met. The parent never establishes that requirement. Criticizing one educational strategy doesn't tell us every condition the economy needs to succeed.
- DCorrect
The parent says young students need curricula suited to their development, then explains why rigorous early study falls short: its gains are temporary, and it can burn children out. That supports the conclusion that this kind of curriculum doesn't adequately meet primary students' developmental needs. It captures the educational criticism without inventing a rule for the whole economy.
- E
This makes the very policy the parent criticizes a requirement for economic competitiveness. The parent says pushing very young children into rigorous study may work against the country, not that the country must do it to succeed. A, C, and E all try to turn this criticism of a strategy into a statement about what national success requires.
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