Q25

[ND17]

can you explain how B is the best answer among the others ?

Thank you

[ohthatpatrick]

Sure thing.

As a quick recap of the passage leading up to that last line,

1st P - people are trying to articulate a theory that would explain the how/when/why of the civil rights movement.

2nd P - Three theories are mentioned and differentiated from each other.

3rd P - Some ppl don't like trying to use any of these theories because they all rely on "strain" to the system, have no predictive value, and seemingly ignore the political aspirations of the civil rights participants.

4th P - The author looks for some way to test how good any of these three theories are. "Problematically", economic data doesn't help us choose the best of the three, since you can find economic data to support any of them.

The author thinks a "better test" would be to see if the economic data that is relevant to each theory correlates well with news reports of social protests. (If social protests were going hand-in-hand with the economic data tied to "J-curve", for example, then "J-curve" would seem like a good explanation for what caused the social protests)

But the author says that none of the theories correlate significantly with the news reports.

So, same as the first half of the 4th paragraph ... we have a muddled, unclear situation, with no clear winner among the three theories.

(A) has to be wrong, because NONE of the theories correlate with the "better test". So there's no way the "better test" confirmed any of them.

(B) is acceptable, because since the "better test" didn't correlate well with any of the theories, it doesn't single out any of the theories as being stronger than the others.

(C) is wrong because it's too extreme. The fact that the test fails to support any of the theories does not show it's impossible to apply any theory to the civil rights movement.

(D) is wrong because there's no support whatsoever for the idea of biased coverage.

(E) is wrong because we have no support that the test verified anything. It didn't correlate well with any of the theories. That's all we know.

Hope this helps.

[ytian03]

Thanks.
But I am still confused with B and C. I chose C, though I have noticed it's extreme.

Your explanation is more logically sound then the article itself to me.

Original words: "The best test is the comparison if each of the ..indicators with the ...events reported in the press; unsurprisingly, none correlates"

Your worlds: "The author thinks a "better test" would be to see if the economic data that is relevant to each theory correlates well with news reports of social protests. But the author says that none of the theories correlate significantly with the news reports."

To me, "but" and "unsurprisingly" have contrary meanings. I think your interpretation makes better sense, but I cannot see it myself from the author's words: If the author thinks press is the "best test" to know the strength of the theories, why was he/she not surprised that the "best test" did no help at all to decide among the theories(answer B)?

On the other hand, if the author use "but" just as in your interpretation, it is much easier to tell that it is to the contrary of his/her expectation and that even the "best test" cannot give us any answers (answer B) , which seems more logical to me.

For the reason the author chose "unsurprisingly" instead of "but", I chose C. Here is my deduction:
If the author was not surprised that the pressed events born no correlation with any of the theories, he/she actually expected the "best test" would disapprove those theories, and thus prove his/her opinion ----- that those theories are all wrong.
This is also supported by the beginning lines of 4th P "This very legitimate complaints..." --- which means the author agrees with political theorists' critics of the theories.

C is extreme and farfetched. But I just cannot see B as the right answer.

[rfrahman]

[*]
I had also chosen C as the correct answer originally after narrowing it down to B and C. Since we know that none of comparisons correlated significantly with the pace of reports about movement activity, we know that we can't necessarily conclude anything. Thus, B is the correct answer because the results were so inconclusive so it provides us with no basis for deciding among the classical theories. Just because the theories may have been inconclusive, though, doesn't mean they were impossible to apply. It may have occurred with some other economic indicator or movement.