RC Question 12 Explanation
DISCUSSION: A lot of people get this wrong. Take it part by part to eliminate some answers. Then, match up your 2-3 best choices with the passage to be sure they really do work, or to eliminate them.
___________
- This doesn’t work, because the blues and spirituals are quite similar, once we get past appearances.
- The blues and spirituals are not subtly different. They seem very different to most people, so much so that many fail to realize they are alike.
- Most people choose this answer. The blues are conventionally misunderstood. So people who don’t know much about the blues misunderstand them. But experts have presumably long understood how the blues are linked to spirituals and West Africa. There’s been no new discovery that prompted the author to write this passage.
Botanists are experts, and we shouldn’t expect them to be ignorant. They’re only changing their minds because of a recent discovery. There was no recent discovery in the passage. - This gets it backwards. The two forms (spirituals and blues) evolved from one older form.
- CORRECT. Many people think the blues and spirituals are different, but they’re really similar. This is probably because they both come from West African religious rituals.
My concern is the same as the past comment made by Rupa, the stimulus doesn’t seem to support the idea that people would find the two genres different. The stimulus from the beginning to the end only gives in large part similarities that branch from the same source with only slight differences, and says nothing about anyone having the idea that the two genres are different.
Good question! The passage implies, in the first paragraph, that people see spirituals and blues as distinct through the common association of blues with sorrow and the criticism it received from church communities. The phrase “secular spiritual” (also first paragraph) reinforces this idea. If something is religious and something else is secular, they would seem opposite at first glance.
But the author argues they share a deeper connection (aiming for a kind of spiritual transformation). So two things that seem opposite are actually unexpectedly alike. This aligns with what E is saying.
It might be more difficult to spot since it’s not explicitly stated but it’s definitely a supported inference from the passage. Hope that helps!
Where in the passage does it say or suggest that many people think spirituals and the blues are different or “superficially unalike”?
Is C also wrong because it says “evolved” whereas the passage in line 31 only indicates they are linked – which is supported in E (“similar to both of them” vs. “evolved”)?
Since the link is to “ancestral cultures”, “evolved” could arguably be the right word because those cultures are the predecessors of blues and African American culture in North America. Also, in line 18 we are told that blues and spirituals “may well arise from a common reservoir of experience”.