PrepTest 149, Section 2, Question 23
The novelist and social theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman,(435 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(9 more words not shown)
- AThe author identifies(32 more words not shown)
- BThe author describes(36 more words not shown)
- CThe author proposes(29 more words not shown)
- DThe author describes(33 more words not shown)
- EThe author presents(35 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
First we meet Gilman and the debate she participated in: one camp treats social competition as unavoidable, while another allows deliberate collective change. The second paragraph places her in the activist camp and explains the responsibility she draws from it: use your talents in socially useful work. The third turns to the changes she wants women to help bring about. We are following her ideas into their application, not watching the author decide which camp wins.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The individual is Gilman, and the two versions are the competing and activist forms of Social Darwinism. Her duty to contribute through useful work is a practical implication of the activist view. Her proposals about women's roles then show what acting on that view could involve. Each part has a job in the sequence this answer describes.
- B
The two related views do appear, but not in the sequence described here. They are introduced as background at the beginning, and the author does not end by rejecting one of them. The ending gives Gilman's recommendations, rather than the author's verdict on the dispute.
- C
We are learning what Gilman thought and advocated. The author does not propose an interpretation of her writings and then argue that we should accept that reading. Explaining someone's ideas is not automatically an argument about how to interpret them.
- D
Where does the author evaluate the group's reasoning? We get an account of its beliefs and Gilman's use of them, not a judgment that the reasoning is good or bad. That evaluation is a required step in D's sequence, and it is missing.
- E
The background is a debate about applying a scientific theory to society. It is not a history of the development of the scientific theory itself. Gilman's role in this social debate does not establish a role in formulating Darwin's science.
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