Poets

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Poets

by vikram_k51 » Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:59 am
Certain minor peculiarities of language are used unconsciously by poets. If such peculiarities appear in the works of more than one poet, they are likely to reflect the language in common use during the poets' time. However, if they appear in the work of only one poet, they are likely to be personal idiosyncrasies. As such, they can provide a kind of "fingerprint" that allows scholars, by comparing a poem of previously unknown authorship to the work of a particular known poet, to identify the poem as the work of that poet.
For which one of the following reasons can the test described above never provide conclusive proof of the authorship of any poem?
(A) The labor of analyzing peculiarities of language both in the work of a known poet and in a poem of unknown authorship would not be undertaken unless other evidence already suggested that the poem of unknown authorship was written by the known poet.
(B) A peculiarity of language that might be used as an identifying mark is likely to be widely scattered in the work of a poet, so that a single poem not known to have been written by that poet might not include that peculiarity.
(C) A peculiarity of language in a poem of unknown authorship could be evidence either that the poem was written by the one author known to use that peculiarity or that the peculiarity was not unique to that author.
(D) Minor peculiarities of language contribute far less to the literary effect of any poem than such factors as poetic form, subject matter, and deliberately chosen wording.
(E) A poet's use of some peculiarities of language might have been unconscious in some poems and conscious in other poems, and the two uses would be indistinguishable to scholars at a later date.

OA C
Source: — Critical Reasoning |

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Pazyryk Valley

by vikram_k51 » Wed Aug 19, 2009 9:01 am
A tree's age can be determined by counting the annual growth rings in its trunk. Each ring represents one year, and the ring's thickness reveals the relative amount of rainfall that year. Archaeologists successfully used annual rings to determine the relative ages of ancient tombs at Pazyryk. Each tomb was constructed from freshly cut logs, and the tombs builders were constrained by tradition to use only logs from trees growing in the sacred Pazyryk Valley.

Which one of the following, if true, contributes most to an explanation of the archaeologists' success in using annual rings to establish the relative ages of the tombs at the Pazyryk site?

(A) The Pazyryk tombs were all robbed during ancient times, but breakage of the tombs seals allowed the seepage of water, which soon froze permanently, thereby preserving the tombs' remaining artifacts.

(B) The Pazyryk Valley, surrounded by extremely high mountains, has a distinctive yearly pattern of rainfall, and so trees growing in the Pazyryk Valley have annual rings that are quite distinct from trees growing in nearby valleys.

(C) Each log in the Pazyryk tombs has among its rings a distinctive sequence of twelve annual rings representing six drought years followed by three rainy years and three more drought years.

(D) The archaeologists determined that the youngest tree used in any of the tombs was 90 years old and that the oldest tree was 450 years old.

(E) All of the Pazyryk tombs contained cultural artifacts that can be dated to roughly 2300 years ago.
OA C

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Re: Poets

by ranell » Thu Aug 20, 2009 2:16 pm
vikram_k51 wrote: OA C
(A) The labor of analyzing peculiarities of language both in the work of a known poet and in a poem of unknown authorship would not be undertaken unless other evidence already suggested that the poem of unknown authorship was written by the known poet. - the moment when the labor of analyzing peculiarities of language is undertaken is out of scope in the argument
(B) A peculiarity of language that might be used as an identifying mark is likely to be widely scattered in the work of a poet, so that a single poem not known to have been written by that poet might not include that peculiarity. - CORRECT as it states the straightforward reason why the described test can never provide conclusive proof of the authorship of any poem
(C) A peculiarity of language in a poem of unknown authorship could be evidence either that the poem was written by the one author known to use that peculiarity or that the peculiarity was not unique to that author. - it is not the reason of the fact that test described above never provide conclusive proof of the authorship of any poem, it's a possible conclusion
(D) Minor peculiarities of language contribute far less to the literary effect of any poem than such factors as poetic form, subject matter, and deliberately chosen wording. - Literary effect and other factors that influence the first one are out of scope
(E) A poet's use of some peculiarities of language might have been unconscious in some poems and conscious in other poems, and the two uses would be indistinguishable to scholars at a later date. - it doesn't matter whether the use of certain peculiarities of language was conscious or unconscious, rather we deal with peculiarities in general as a mean to distinguish one poet from the other

WHy not B?

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by pandeyvineet24 » Thu Aug 20, 2009 9:13 pm
Answer should be C, B looks tempting though but its OOS.

But B can be ignored because it talks about the poem that does not have a peculiarity of language.
The argument only talks relating the authors whose poems have peculiarity of language. This is out of scope i think

C is correct, because it would be very hard to establish the author of a poem, when poem includes a peculiarity of language and that peculiarity is shared among many poets.

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by kris77 » Sun May 15, 2016 3:59 pm
I think C is the best in this case.