#15 - Global Reference, Main Point

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[nanirs2020]

I was between B and C on this question but ended up choosing C. I thought that "widely accepted" in B wasn't fully supported. I know it's a "common view" and "generally accepted" but I thought "widely" was a little strong, but maybe I'm thinking too much into it. Can you also please explain why C is wrong? Thank you!

[Jeremy Press]

Hi nanirs,

Great question! According to Merriam-Webster, the particular usage of "widely" here means "by or among a large well-dispersed group of people." It's true that we don't quite have exactly the quantitative evidence I might've hoped for in the passage (particularly to support the notion of "large"). But we do have the terms you note, principally the phrase "common view," which is enough to suggest that there are a substantial number of people who hold that view. The phrases "common view" and "widely accepted" are close enough for our purposes, particularly where all the other answers (including C) have fatal flaws.

The fatal flaw in answer choice C is where it says that "archaeological evidence" supports the author's view of things (the author's view being the "fear of wilderness" and "social gathering places" models of clearings). But this isn't true in the passage. Rather, the author says at the end of the second paragraph that "other ethnographic evidence may suggest a different vision, a non-economic one." Nothing in the last two paragraphs introduces any "archeological evidence" either. So answer choice C is a mistaken description of the evidence used to support the "fear of wilderness"/"social gathering places" model.

I hope this helps!