#11 - Specific Reference, Must Be True, Purpose

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[ChicaRosa]

I'm trying to understand why D is correct and not B?

I understood that the last sentence of the second paragraph was trying to further explain a fact about the Great Migration but is is B wrong because there were no later events that were explained in the 3rd and 4th paragraphs?

Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Actually, Chica, the last sentence of the second paragraph ("Less clear, however...") isn't trying to explain anything - it's telling us that something has NOT been well explained, which sets us up for the rest of the passage, in which the author then proposes an explanation for that previously unclear thing. In other words, it is not saying that we know something, but that we do not know something. We know that the Great Migration continued, and even accelerated, in the 1920's through the 1950's, but we don't know why. That explains nothing, but tells us that something is true and that needs explaining. That's why B is a bad answer here - that sentence doesn't explain something that comes later, but rather tells us something that IS EXPLAINED later.

That's a clever answer trap they laid for us. Be careful about those!

[April30Gang]

Hello Powerscore,

While I get the set up of D. How can we say it's a fact when it seems like a hypothesis with events that could make the entire phenomenon one giant coincidence? For all we know something totally different prompted the move.

Paragraph 3 starts with, "we propose that," which makes it a tough sell to label it a fact. Can someone help me here.

[Adam Tyson]

The last sentence of the second paragraph does present a fact, April30Gang, and that fact is that "migration continued, and even accelerated, in subsequent decades, at the same time that North–South income differences were narrowing." The author isn't hypothesizing that migration continued and accelerated, but telling us that it did, in fact, do that. The purpose of that sentence is to present that fact and indicate that the author will seek to explain it, since it is not yet clear why that happened.

The fact isn't presented in the next paragraph. It's right there in the sentence we were asked to analyze! What comes after is a hypothesis, but it's still a hypothesis that is offered to explain a previously unexplained fact.