#23 - Specific Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

The correct answer choice is (E).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice.


This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[balikbayan]

I originally chose E because it was out of instinct. My prephase was that "emphasizes prescribed roles" was just used to show the roles people had to do in their culture. And E had this. But despite this, I still went with A because i was looking at the bigger picture.

The whole passage was trying to give further support for the difference between life passage and life history. This example was specifically leaning towards life passage and since it was also similar to the definition of what life-passage is, it also made sense to me why A was more accurate than E.

I want to follow my instinct, but there's always that possibility that my instinct is wrong. I liked the sound of A and i just can't find what's wrong with it.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi balikbayan,

In this case, your instincts were correct, but I'm not going to just recommend that you pick answers based on your instincts.

The correct way to solve this question is to find the direct support for your answer based on the text of the passage itself.

This question is a specific reference question. It is asking how the term "prescribed roles" is being used specifically in the context of how it appears in line 24. In other words, we're looking for an answer that describes/defines the term itself. Ideally, we should be able to swap the correct answer for the term "prescribed roles" in the sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence.

As your prephrase was basically getting at, the "prescribed roles" refers to the roles that society/culture expects certain people to fill. This can be determined by the next sentence in the passage, "the narrator tells her story in a way that conforms to tribal expectations" (my emphasis)(lines 24-25). Since the "prescribed roles" that are mentioned here are referring to a specific example of a life passage (line 22), referring back to the earlier description in paragraph one of life-passage studies, which "emphasize the requirements of society" (my emphasis)(lines 5-6) can also shed light on how the term is being used here.

Answer E best matches your prephrase, and is the correct answer. We could swap Answer E for the term "prescribed roles" in the sentence and the sentence would still have the same meaning.

You wrote:

"But despite this, I still went with A because i was looking at the bigger picture."

Unfortunately, that is not what you're being asked to do in this question. In Reading Comp, there are questions that do ask about the big picture, which we refer to as "Global" questions (such as Main Point, Passage Organization, Tone, etc.), but there are also questions that ask about specific details, and this is the latter.

One important point to note is that this question is not asking for the purpose or function of the term being used. In other words, the question is not asking why the author uses this term. These questions do appear in Reading Comprehension and would require you to think about how the particular term or example serves the author's broader point/argument. Here though, the question is just looking for a definition/description of a specific term based on the context of the passage.

As for Answer A, this is not describing how the term "prescribed roles" is used in the sentence in the passage. In fact, if you swapped Answer A for the term in the sentence, the sentence wouldn't really even make sense. It's not the anthropologist Truman Michelson (who recorded The Autobiography of a Fox Woman) and who emphasized the "prescribed roles" according to the passage) who would refer to the function of life passage studies in helping ethnologists, it would be the author of the passage, and (possibly) anthropologist David Mandelbaum, who made the initial distinction between life-passage studies and life-history studies (lines 1-4).