Q27

[eunjung.shin]

Beforer going into answer choices, I thought groundbreaking and helped the future but not totally ideal. I knocked C out because of the second part.
How do we know it was feasible at the time?


Thanks for your help!

[giladedelman]

Thanks for your question!

Even if you think (C) is not 100% supportable, remember that our job is to pick the best answer, not the perfect answer. So let's first see why the other ones are worse.

(A) is incorrect because the views were not modest; in fact, they were pretty radical.

(B) should leap off the page as a really extreme answer. Fundamentally unethical? The author never discusses the ethicality of anything. This is way too strong. Plus, the author's attitude seems to be positive with respect to the proposals, so a negative answer is going to be tough to support.

(D) is incorrect because the author explains in the first sentence of the third paragraph why the reforms failed. So there's no evidence that he finds it hard to understand why this happened.

(E) is contradicted by the passage. The proposed reforms weren't too limited, they actually went too far for the time period!

So we've got four terrible answers, leaving us with (C). I actually think this is a pretty solid answer. Clearly the author would agree that the proposals were "well meaning." As for the "as much as was feasible at the time" part, we should again look to the first sentence of the third paragraph:

That neither proposal was able to envision a system of education that was fully equal for women, and that neither was adopted into law even as such, bespeaks the immensity of the cultural and political obstacles to egalitarian education for women at the time.

This gives support to the idea that the proposals were limited by the cultural/political attitudes of the time period, so they were trying to accomplish what was feasible, rather than what was ideal, i.e., complete educational equality.

So (C) definitely has some support, in my opinion pretty strong support, but even some support beats no support every day of the week (and twice on Sundays).

Does that clear this up for you?

[eunjung.shin]

yes very much. THANK YOU.

I think it is difficult to find the support for "feasible" given the short period of time.

After I eliminate the four bad choices, if I think the last one is not yet good enough(like this one- I didn't find support for the second half), I go back to the other 4 choices to re-evaluate them. Is this a bad strategy?

Inf Qs in reading is so much harder than LR.

[houstondavidson]

Hi there,

I am not satisfied with the explanation as to why C is the correct answer. I selected B. While not perfect, B seems to work better.

Why not C?
- "well meaning": it's not clear that the author finds these attempts well-meaning. In fact, there's evidence in the text that the author has judged both of them to by cynically deficient and beholden to a certain hypocrisy.
-feasible: when does this concept come up?

Why B?
the author's framing of the second paragraph (and 3rd) seems to suggest a positive moral worldview in which she condemns not just the failure to implement the half-measures but the hypocritical incompleteness of both measures. So yes it seems that "fundamentally unethical" is strong but it doesn't appear unjustified.

[ohthatpatrick]

It seems like you really mis-heard the tone/purpose of the author. The real difference maker in your ability to get this problem right happens in the first paragraph.

Early on, you're trying to figure out the author's purpose. The vast majority of RC passages begins with background facts and/or other people's claims, before we ever hear the author's voice or learn her focus/objective with this passage.

The most typical words you see that pivot from the background facts/claims into the AUTHOR's motive/emphasis are
but .... yet ... however ... recently

So starting this passage I see
1st sentence: Historical fact. (Setup)
2nd sentence: Someone ELSE's claim (BIG setup .. get ready for a "but")
3rd sentence: "However"

At this moment, I feel like I have solved the passage. I will slow down to really process the 2nd and 3rd sentence, because THIS is the headline of the whole passage.

Some people: "the failure to pass educational reform was a missed opportunity"

Author: "However ---"

You take a sec and say to yourself the opposite of that previous claim:
Author: "Nuh-uh. It's not fair to say that post-revolution France FAILED in their attempt to make education more egalitarian." Why? Because "legislators had put forth many proposals .... blah-blah-blah"

2nd paragraph:
The first of THESE proposals ... blah-blah-blah
The second ... blah-blah-blah

We know that the author discussed the proposals in order to disagree with the "one recent observer" in line 4. Even though the author makes some negative points in the 2nd paragraph, conceding the weaknesses in these proposals that we see with our modern eye, the author's purpose in discussing them is to unpack lines 11-15, and the purpose of this sentence is to go AGAINST the idea that these proposals/legislators should be condemned by their failure to pounce on the moment for progress.

3rd paragraph
That first sentence is saying, "The fact that the proposals sound less-than-truly-equal is because the climate was SO sexist that even being very progressive still didn't mean jumping to total equality." It's like expecting the US to go overnight from having a slave-based economy to having perfect racial equality.

It's also saying "the fact that these proposals weren't actually passed into law is also just speaking to how deep this culture was in the previous modes of thinking."

The author is answering the "one recent observer" in line 4 with an essay saying, "These were some fairly progressive proposals, for the time. They're obviously not acceptable by our modern standards, but give these people a break. They were trying to greatly overhaul a completely rigid, historically deep form of gender inequality. Think of the political and cultural friction you'd encounter as a headwind when you're hoping to change so drastically."

[DavidH327]

Why is E incorrect?
In line 42-44 it states that neither proposal was able to envision system that was "fully equal" for women....
And I thought it would justify E that states "their aims were not fully comprehensive"