PrepTest 141, Section 2, Question 10

What we’re looking for

Working the answers

• A
  Correct

  This provides the missing connection. Audiences can't readily discern the characters' personalities, so under this rule they won't take any interest in those characters. That leaves no character whose fate the audience cares about. The plays therefore fail the requirement for success that the actor supplies.

• B

  What determines a personality doesn't tell us whether an audience must understand it to care about the character. We could accept that motives and beliefs determine personality and still care about someone whose motives confuse us. The needed connection to audience interest remains missing.

• C

  This adds a stronger relationship between caring and success than the premise gives: their amounts must be directly proportional. But even that rule doesn't connect confusing personalities with a lack of caring. We still don't know how much the audience cares about Brecht's characters, so C doesn't establish that these plays fail.

• D

  We already know that both actors and audiences struggle to discern the personalities. A rule carrying that difficulty from actors to audiences doesn't take us any further toward lack of interest. The gap is between understanding and caring, not between the two groups' ability to understand.

• E

  This tells us that other plays with sympathetic characters succeed. That doesn't show Brecht's plays fail. A play might lack empathy and still succeed by some other route under E's rule. We need to rule out success for these plays, which requires the missing connection between confusing personalities and the audience's lack of caring.