PrepTest 138, Section 4, Question 20
Historian: Radio drama requires its listeners to think(45 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- APeople spend as(14 more words not shown)
- BThe more familiar(16 more words not shown)
- CBecause it inhibits(13 more words not shown)
- DFor today's generation(17 more words not shown)
- ETelevision drama does(10 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Listening to a story makes you supply things the sound doesn't show. What does the character look like? Where is everyone standing? Radio drama can make you build that scene in your head, much as an audiobook or a written story does.
But radio isn't the only way to use your imagination. Today's television viewers might also read books, listen to stories or daydream. Even television could prompt imagining beyond the pictures on the screen. Losing one regular source of imaginative exercise doesn't establish that people exercise their imaginations less often overall.
What we’re looking for
For the required assumption, I'd ask whether anything makes up for the lost exercise. The historian needs that gap to remain unfilled. Otherwise, people could replace the imagining they used to do during radio dramas with imagining elsewhere, and the generational comparison wouldn't follow. This is about frequency, not a claim that modern people have no imagination.
Working the answers
- A
Exact equality in hours isn't required. Today's viewers could spend somewhat more or less time watching television than earlier listeners spent with radio, while still exercising their imaginations less often overall. What matters is whether the lost imaginative activity is replaced, not whether the entertainment hours match perfectly.
- B
The argument doesn't compare how familiar radio and television are to their audiences. It points to a particular feature of radio drama: listeners have to picture things for themselves. We don't need a general rule that every familiar form of entertainment calls on imagination less, or evidence that television is more familiar than radio was.
- C
Calling television undesirable adds a judgment the historian doesn't make. Someone could think a form of entertainment involves less imagination and still enjoy it or value it for other reasons. C also adds a claim about inhibiting the development of creativity, beyond the stated comparison in how frequently people exercise imagination.
- DCorrect
Nothing fills the gap left by radio. That blocks the possibility that other activities compensate for the lost imaginative exercise. It doesn't mean television viewers never read, daydream or imagine anything. Those activities just don't make up the difference needed to defeat the historian's comparison.
- E
Thinking isn't limited to picturing appearances and spatial relationships. A viewer might think about a character's motives or follow the plot without supplying those visual details. The historian doesn't need television to require no thought at all. That is much stronger than the claim about less frequent exercise of imagination.
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