PrepTest 146, Section 2, Question 17
Film historians often find it difficult to determine(55 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- ANewspaper and magazine(13 more words not shown)
- BTypical audience members'(15 more words not shown)
- CThe box office(16 more words not shown)
- DFilm historians do(15 more words not shown)
- EFilms from the(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Selling tickets doesn't tell us what happened in people's heads. A movie can attract a large audience without telling us which scenes viewers found funny, frightening, or moving. Financial success and an account of the audience's experience are different kinds of information.
What we’re looking for
The reviews seem more promising: surely a critic describes a reaction to the movie. But whose reaction? We're trying to recover what typical viewers thought, and a professional critic's response might not represent theirs. Since the historians find these reviews unhelpful too, I'd expect an inference along those lines: the reviews don't reveal the typical audience's views. That's the connection to look for in this most strongly supported question.
Working the answers
- A
We aren't told when the reviews were written relative to the general release. An early review and a later review could both fail to capture typical viewers' reactions. The timing doesn't follow from the historians' difficulty.
- B
'Especially' difficult for early films doesn't mean easy for later ones. The later responses could also be hard to determine, just less hard. B turns a comparison in difficulty into an unsupported assurance that the later task is easy.
- C
Not being able to read audience reactions from revenue figures doesn't show that reactions have no bearing on a movie's success. Perhaps viewers' emotional responses help make a film successful, but its ticket sales still don't tell historians what viewers found funny or moving. The passage concerns what the figures reveal, not what a film needs in order to succeed.
- DCorrect
This connects the final sentence to the historians' task. They want typical audience members' views, yet newspaper and magazine reviews fail to provide much insight. That supports the conclusion that the historians don't regard those reviews as revealing the typical audience's views. It doesn't require us to invent a different reason the reviews failed.
- E
Unhelpful reviews aren't the same thing as absent reviews. The passage discusses reviews that fail to supply the desired insight; it doesn't tell us what proportion of early films received reviews. We can't conclude that those films usually went unreviewed.
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