Dealing with "the author would agree with" questions

[sdb606]

Can you think of a better way to rephrase these questions? I find trying to imagine what an author would agree/disagree with to be too ambiguous. Lots of my wrong answer choices are wrong because they're not specifically in the passage but any reasonable person who wrote those passages (IMO) would probably agree with those statements, even if they're not technically in the passage. They're extremely close but not specifically called out.

For example, Dec 2007, Passage 4, q 21 (CR Bible p 396). I chose B, because it said the effectiveness of a predatory relationship should be verifiable in a controlled environment as well as an uncontrolled environment. Yes, the passage doesn't say you MUST verify results in a controlled environment but what self-respecting scientist would disagree with the idea that hypotheses should be experimentally verifiable before being accepted as fact?

Could I just convert "the author would agree with" to "it can be inferred from the passage" to remove the ambiguity created when imagining a live person? Is there a more effective rephrase than that?

[Adam Tyson]

That's a great way to deal with those questions, sdb606, and it matches what most of those question stems ask. The example you gave begins with the phrase "Based on the passage," and that means you have to base your answer on what the passage said, even if the answer is not a direct quote from the passage. In other words, don't make any assumptions about what this author should believe, but rely solely on the text in the passage just as you would on any Must Be True/Most Strongly Supported question in the Logical Reasoning section. That's what every Author Perspective question is, after all - a form of a Must Be True question, in which you have to rely on the facts in the passage and on no outside information. We can't rely on our beliefs about what any self-respecting scientist would say, but only on what THIS scientist would say, and only based on what they DID say in the passage!

[Cozybear]

What a great question, thank you for pointing that out. I will forever change the way I think about it from now on.
Those questions felt so messy.

Can you think of a better way to rephrase these questions? I find trying to imagine what an author would agree/disagree with to be too ambiguous. Lots of my wrong answer choices are wrong because they're not specifically in the passage but any reasonable person who wrote those passages (IMO) would probably agree with those statements, even if they're not technically in the passage. They're extremely close but not specifically called out.

For example, Dec 2007, Passage 4, q 21 (CR Bible p 396). I chose B, because it said the effectiveness of a predatory relationship should be verifiable in a controlled environment as well as an uncontrolled environment. Yes, the passage doesn't say you MUST verify results in a controlled environment but what self-respecting scientist would disagree with the idea that hypotheses should be experimentally verifiable before being accepted as fact?

Could I just convert "the author would agree with" to "it can be inferred from the passage" to remove the ambiguity created when imagining a live person? Is there a more effective rephrase than that?