RC Question 12 Explanation
DISCUSSION: The final question, and the final specific detail question of five. The fact that there were so many detail questions shows that you were expected to know this passage like the back of your hand. It’s easier to find details if you skim over the passage once more after reading it. While looking over the passage, make sure you know the function of each paragraph; they all have one.
___________
- This strings together an idea from the second paragraph with an idea from the third paragraph to form a nonsense sentence that has no support in the passage.
- The third paragraph says this is true of the Mexican American community. We don’t know if it’s true of all communities.
- Lines 7-10 tell us that Mexico got many proverbs from Spain, but we’re not told whether Spaniards use proverbs the same way as Mexican Americans do.
- CORRECT. This is devilishly abstract. It refers to the proverb on lines 32-33. We can understand it, even though it has been translated (therefore, it is outside of its Spanish verbal context). But we understand it differently from Mexican Americans, because we don’t share their social context, which emphasizes group-individual relations.
- Lines 22-24 say that Mexican Americans are different from English-Speaking Americans in that Mexican Americans use proverbs for education. But maybe English speaking communities do frequently use proverbs to teach about peer-group relations in particular. That’s narrower than education in general.
I think the solution is much less abstract then you think. We can get support for answer D from lines 4-8 and 13-15 which basically establish that all proverbs can be understood without a verbal context and every time a proverb is used its meaning varies depending on the particular social context.