Great question. This one can be confusing because they flip around the answers from the prompt. What I would do is put the prompt in the right order and then look for the answer. In this case, they're saying for a proper understanding of Spanish porcelain, one needs an understanding of Arabic porcelain.
A is backwards - it's telling us that to understand something that is currently happening, we need to look at what it does in turn later. What we're going for is that in order to understand something, we need to know what happened before. If we wanted to use the research in aging prompt, we could say that in order to understand the trends in research on aging, we need to understand what previous generations have thought about aging; or, we need to understand previous trends in anti-aging research.
