Thursdays With Ron - Inference Questions (Part II)

by Manhattan Prep, Jun 9, 2011

Every other Thursday, our instructorRon Purewal (known on the Beat The GMAT forums aslunarpower) hosts a free study hall session, calledThursdays with Ron, where anyone can submit questions ahead of time and attend. Ron chooses a few themes from the questions he gets and goes over strategies for them.

In this session, Ron looks at inference questions in Reading Comprehension.The video follows a question, so make sure to take the two minutes allotted in it to do the question yourself. The text of the reading comprehension passage along with the question itself is also written out below.

If you want more video explanation, you can find the full recording,here .

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hop9oVBqt0M[/youtube]

For many years, historians thought that the development of capitalism had not faced seriouschallengesin the United States. Writing in the early twentieth century, Progressive historians sympathized with the battles waged by farmers and small producers against large capitalists in the late nineteenth century, but they did not question thewidespreadacceptance of laissez-faire (unregulated) capitalism throughout American history. Similarly, Louis Hartz, who sometimes disagreed with the Progressives, argued that Americans accepted laissez-faire capitalism without challenge because they lacked a feudal, precapitalist past. Recently, however, some scholars have argued that even though laissez-faire became the prevailing ethos innineteenth-century America, it was not accepted withoutstruggle. Laissez-fairecapitalism, they suggest, clashed with existing religious and communitarian norms that imposed moral constraints on acquisitiveness to protect the weak from the predatory, the strong from corruption, and the entire culture from materialist excess. Buttressed by mercantilist notions that government should be both regulator and promoter of economic activity, these norms persisted long after the American Revolution helpedunleashthe economic forces that producedcapitalism. These scholars argue that even in the late nineteenth century, with thegovernment'srole in the economy considerablydiminished, laissez-faire had not triumphed completely. Hard times continued torevivepopular demands for regulating business and softening the harsh edges of laissez-faire capitalism.

The passage suggests that the scholars mentioned in the first highlighted portion of text would agree with which of the following statements regarding the "norms" mentioned in the second highlighted portion of text?

(A) They provided a primary source of opposition to the development of laissez-faire captialism in the United states in the nineteenth century.

(B) Their appeal was undermined bydifficulteconomic times in the United States at the end of the nineteenthcentury.

(C) They disappeared in the United States in the late nineteenth century because of the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism.

(D) They facilitated the successful implementation of mercantilist notions of government in the United States in the nineteenth century.

(E) They are now recognized by historians as having been an important part of theideologyof the American Revolution.

If you want to view recordings of past Thursdays with Ron or submit questions for the next live session which takes place on June 16, you can do so here.