Historians have identified two dominant currents

[tronghieu1987@gmail.com]

Historians have identified two dominant currents in the Russian women's movement of the late tsarist period. "Bourgeois" feminism, so called by its more radical opponents, emphasized "individualist" feminist goals such as access to education, career opportunities, and legal equality. "Socialist" eminists, by contrast, emphasized class, rather than gender, as the principal source of women's inequality and oppression, and socialist revolution, not legal reform, as the only road to emancipation and equality.

However, despite antagonism between bourgeois feminists and socialist feminists, the two movements shared certain underlying beliefs. Both regarded paid labor as the principal means by which women might attain emancipation: participation in the workplace and economic self-sufficiency, they believed, would make women socially useful and therefore deserving of equality with men. Both groups also recognized the enormous difficulties women faced when they combined paid labor with motherhood. In fact, at the First All-Russian Women's Congress in 1908, most participants advocated maternity insurance and paid maternity leave, although the intense hostility between some socialists and bourgeois feminists at the Congress made it difficult for them to recognize these areas of agreement. Finally, socialist feminists and most bourgeois feminists concurred in subordinating
women's emancipation to what they considered the more important goal of liberating the entire Russian population from political oppression, economic
backwardness, and social injustice.

The passage is primarily concerned with
(A) identifying points of agreement between two groups
(B) advocating one approach to social reform over another
(C) contrasting two approaches to solving a political problem
(D) arguing that the views espoused by one political group were more radical than those espoused by another group
(E) criticizing historians for overlooking similarities between the views espoused by two superficially dissimilar groups

This question was posted before, but without image to prove the source, so it was not explained.

I attached the screenshot, so please help me to explain why the correct answer is choice A, not C.
I see that the issue in choice A is mentioned only in paragraph 2.
In choice C, someone said that there's no political problem in the passage. However, as in the last sentence in paragraph 1 "...and socialist revolution, not legal reform, as the only road to emancipation and equality". I think this is the problem that 2 approaches aimed to solve.

[RonPurewal]

so, that word “primarily” in the question? that’s important… very important.

remember—“primarily” means…
…mostly (or, equivalently, more than anything else),
…but not entirely.

i’m sure that none of the above is news to you (“primarily”, after all, is a pretty basic vocabulary word). but, you’re not thinking enough here about what is “primary”.

the passage is, basically, structured like this:
≈30 percent: “here are two schools of thought that are different…”
≈70 percent: “…but they have ALL THESE THINGS IN COMMON.”

it should be eminently clear which of these is “primary” and which isn’t.

[RonPurewal]

also, if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that the first paragraph is really only there as background for the second paragraph anyway. (the author points out that these schools of thought are ostensibly different to make their similarities seem more remarkable.)

in other words, the passage basically amounts to "even though they were theoretically different, these two groups had lots of stuff in common."

of course, you don't have to think that much—if the passage is one-third X and two-thirds Y, then Y is primary, and X is not.

[tronghieu1987@gmail.com]

also, if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that the first paragraph is really only there as background for the second paragraph anyway. (the author points out that these schools of thought are ostensibly different to make their similarities seem more remarkable.)

in other words, the passage basically amounts to "even though they were theoretically different, these two groups had lots of stuff in common."

of course, you don't have to think that much—if the passage is one-third X and two-thirds Y, then Y is primary, and X is not.

Thanks much, Ron. I have to admit that when I did this question, I did see the proportion that you indicate. But what about the scoring system tip in main idea question type. I wonder whether we should only apply it in long passage?

[RonPurewal]

i'm not sure what "the scoring system tip" is.

on the other hand, NEVER, EVER, EVER allow any 'system', 'rule', or 'method' to override your normal everyday common sense.

remember:
• this exam is designed NOT to require any specialized or technical skills or training. it requires a lot of thinking that is careful and precise, but nonetheless still natural to the human brain.
• you CANNOT develop 'rules' that will solve the problems in the verbal section. (if you could develop such 'rules', you would become a billionaire overnight in the artificial intelligence industry.) if you are ever presented with ANY 'formula' for ANYTHING in the verbal section, know that it is, at best, a very crude approximation, to be used only if you have no real intuition at all about the problem.

you should need 'systems'/'rules'/'methods' only if you find the text of the passage so overwhelming that you literally cannot understand what the author is saying. then, those things will constitute a (very crude) backup method.

[tronghieu1987@gmail.com]

I'm absolutely clear. All of your answers kind of overly satisfy me. Thanks a lot!

[tim]

"Overly satisfy"? Is that good or bad? Glad to hear you got your questions answered.

[RonPurewal]

I'm absolutely clear. All of your answers kind of overly satisfy me. Thanks a lot!

'kind of' + 'overly' ... lol.

(:

[deependra.vikram.singh]

Thanks Ron you are great.. was looking for this answer

[RonPurewal]

you're welcome.

[JbhB682]

Hi - wanted to re-open this thread really quickly. I wanted to go over option C specifically.

I actually believed option C was something that cut across both paragraphs (not just relegated to paragraph 1)

Reason for this was

Sentence 1) Author introduces two groups / movements, each wanting to achieve feminism in Russia ( Group 1 were "Bourgeois" group vs Group 2 - "Socialist" feminist group).
Both of these groups had differences (rest of paragraph 1) with each other.
Both of these groups had similarities (all of paragraph 2) with each other.

But the main point was there were 2 groups or 2 movements to achieve the goal of feminism in Russia.

Isn't that what option C is essentially saying -- there were two approaches (i.e. movements or groups) to solve a political problem ?

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Thanks for framing your question so clearly. I advise using a technique I call "matching": link up terms in the answer choices to see if they match with the passage. In answer C, we have the phrase 'two approaches'. We can link this to the 'two movements' mentioned in the first line of the second paragraph. However, answer C mentions 'a political problem', and I would argue that the issue of women's equality and feminism isn't a political problem, it's a social one.

As for the question regarding the role of the two paragraphs, I see the first paragraph as background to the points in the second. Let's take a crude example: "A and B seem different, but they actually share some qualities." I'm sure that you'd agree that my main point is that they share some qualities; I'm not primarily contrasting A and B. Link this example to answers C and A.