#19 - Specific Reference, Must Be True, Purpose/Function

[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!

[asmith14149]

When someone gets a chance, can they reply to my comment to explain the answer? I chose D; and while I think I see why it is wrong, I would like a thorough explanation to avoid making a similar mistake in the future.

[Adam Tyson]

The third paragraph begins with these two sentences, asmith14149:

What makes the recent studies particularly compelling, however, is not so much their organization of chronology as their unflinching willingness to confront the reasons for the collapse of the women's movement. For Landes and Badinter, the necessity of women's having to speak in the established vocabularies of certain intellectual and political traditions diminished the ability of the women's movement to resist suppression.

The rest of the passage explains how that led to the collapse of the movement. So when we get to the text at the end of the passage that the question asks us about, where it mentions the cost to women of "speaking in borrowed voices," it's referring back to that earlier statement and summarizing it. The cost in question is the harm done to their cause; the movement collapsed.

The problem with answer D is that it doesn't describe that harm. Rather, it's describing one of the things that led to that harm. In essence, this question is asking us what the effect of speaking in borrowed voices was, and answer D is only telling us one of the ways that women ended up speaking in those voices. It's an answer about the cause, rather than about the effect.