RC Question 20 Explanation
DISCUSSION: This question directs you to a specific paragraph. You should skim over that paragraph before looking at the answers. The answer will be directly in the paragraph.
If you have preloaded all the information into your head, this will speed you up, because you can instantly find the right answer and eliminate the wrong ones. Most students spend most of their time stuck between wrong answers.
___________
- The second paragraph doesn’t say this. And that would be a confusing system! If tokens had multiple meanings, then you wouldn’t know whether a pyramid meant “sheep” or “gold”.
- We do know that some later tokens looked like bowls and jars, which aren’t agricultural. But that doesn’t mean that these were preferred as temple contributions. We have no idea what was preferred.
- CORRECT. The first tokens were cones, spheres and pyramids (see line 21). Later tokens looked like real world objects such as bowls and jars (see lines 35-36). So, the later tokens were less abstract.
- Huh? The paragraph doesn’t even mention liquids. Presumably this answer is trying to trick you by referencing the bowls and jars of lines 35-36.
- This is false. Lines 51-55 show that the Cuneiform writing was more flexible: you could represent “five oil” with a picture of a a jar, of oil, and the number five. With tokens, you’d need five tokens, which gets awkward once you get to large numbers.
I choice answer A when stuck between A and C because the passage referenced the variety of new things being represented. For answer choice A, it seems to read that there were many tokens that designated many types of items; in other words, there are many tokens and they are designating more than one type of item (so there are multiple items being designated by multiple tokens). Although I’m seeing now how it could be construed as tokens with one image that represent multiple tangible things, can you clarify why the other meaning is absolutely not the case?
I guess it’s just the grammar of it. For example, suppose I say: “There are many people here that own more than one car”.
That refers to each person singly, and each person referred to owns more than one car. Likewise, this answer refers to the tokens single as each representing more than one item.
Gramatically this is a restrictive clause or defining clause. But I had to look it up to write it. If the sentence meant what you thought, it would instead be phrased along these lines: “There many tokens, collectively representing multiple items.”
Grammar is tricky.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.